Maybe all those laid off workers could be hired as telephone receptionists and displace all those automated answering machine that consider your call important but never know where to direct your call.
The "stealing" charge is more complex than it looks. If we are talking about plagiarism, of course that's stealing. But if we are talking about learning the general rules of composition in any media, and of argument and then using them to express ideas and arguments that others may have expressed non-identically before, that's just what most people are going to do. Being unoriginal is not considered plagiarism. Working off someone else's ideas is called "inspiration." Can AI do this now? I suspect not. Will it be able in the future? Why not?
Data centre use of resources is an environmental problem and should of course be severely restricted. Displacement of workers is a problem we've faced repeatedly before, and usually haven't solved well; I tend to favor a guaranteed annual income, but I know many people reflexively consider that outrageous -- often people who have a position in society where they don't have to worry about income.
Even if you shut down every data center in the US and banish all the techbros ("nothing of value was lost"), AI will continue to exist and to be developed further. This is out of your hands. You can't stop it. Dreaming that it be banned all over the world is fatuous. What do you plan to do about it?
The actual thinking ability of AI is almost negligible at the present time. It won't continue so. There is nothing between your ears except water and tissue, shaped by millions of years of evolution. It's incredibly complex. It isn't infinitely complex. It is a material structure and it will sooner or later, probably very much later, be copied. Will it be improved on? I expect that depends on what you mean by "improved."
Yeah it would've been nice to see a million YouTube videos calling for this instead of trying to convince people "AI CaN'T mAkE aRT"**
maybe now we will.
**Before you try to argue that point; MEANING, i.e. the metric we use define art, is not a by-product of the means of production, it is created between the object and the observer. Meaning is subjective, not objective. Y'all look like idiots trying to argue the opposite.
As a person who started off as a nurse's aide and finished my career as a professional healthcare provider, I can tell you that no one wants a fucking robot getting them to the toilet or the shower or feeding them or talking to them about their family or basically doing anything. So there's that you mindless chodes who never had any friends and are ruining it for the rest of us who actually did.
A lot of towns in Pennsylvania’s coal region are still waiting for those new jobs to reach them after the mines shut down a generation ago. Expecting the magic of the invisible hand to create new jobs to replace the ones that are lost ignores the fact that the invisible hand tends to give poor rural communities the finger.
And if you want to know why so many people in those communities joined the maga cult, that’s one of the reasons (racism, misogyny, and homophobia are the other reasons).
I don’t know if Bernie’s idea would work, but it’s a start of a conversation we should be having about what kind of a world we want to live in and technology marches inevitably forward.
I'm still waiting for a follow-up from the guys here who mansplained to me that data centers weren't really going to be a problem once they were up and running
This sounds like a solution worth looking into. Bottom line, unless we do SOMETHING the AI shit is going to FUBAR our society once and for all. Income inequality will become stratospheric. It wouldn't be sustainable.
I think that's part of the draw for the tech bros. They are trying to break governments so they never have to pay "extractive and extortionate taxes" to a nation again.
Whatever happened to their idea of building a floating libertarian utopia for rich assholes somewhere in the middle of the ocean? Why can’t they all go there?
He can address the nation all he wants. We just don't have to tune in to listen to his ranting. Perhaps if the ratings were in the toilet, he would get the message that we don't give a f*ck about what he has to say about anything.
I havs no doubt the AI bros are willing to put money into a sovereign fund. They know it's a bubble and by the time anything is set up the whole thing will have already collapsed after they've taken what the could out of it. There's a reason no one tries to hype AI up except the various CEO's. No one would use it, outside of very specific tasks, unless they were forced to which is why it has to be pushed into everything whether people want it or not. The longer LLM's are live, the more LLM hallucinations they scrape as part of the data they use and that's not good for them.
As for the job losses.
They've already hit the easy ones. Copy editors, writers, and the like. Jobs where an advanced spell checker and predictive text program can almost do the job. People do notice the AI slop though, and are turned off by it.
Artists are next. But again, AI slop and uncanny valley are turn offs for most people.
The reality is most blue collar and technical jobs will be safer. No AI is going to fix your car, plumb your home, do wiring, welding outside of factory lines etc. White collar jobs, middle managers, the CEO's are the ones who will be replaced. Look at something like a tire shop chain. Who's more vital for running the chain? The ones actually changing the tires, or the one doing the spreadsheets five levels up?
I think once the white collar bros figure it out the backlash against AI is going to get really loud.
As a technical writer, I'm hoping that my fintech company - which is pushing AI on workers and customers like crazy - will realize that I write the documents that the company AI thingie mines for content, so keeping me around is to their benefit.
The faith that future AI is going to be as inept as present AI is touching but naive. The history of technology is littered with stories of "couldn't be done." Some things are not efficient to do, or turn out not to be wanted, but "can't be done" is probably limited to such things as travel faster than the speed of light.
I would think that at some point someone will decide there's enough technical data that technical writers are no longer needed. Until the errors get so out of control that technical writers have to get rehired, likely at a lower pay rate, to fix the fuckups.
I don’t know if AI as it is now will survive long enough for that to be a repeating cycle or not.
I have lately heard ICE thugs described as "snatch squads", but they are in fact snuff squads, just as racist and murderous as their Sturmabteilung forebears. Susan Collins would be concerned, but she has other worries on her small mind.
The sad thing is that people blame A.I. for the “loneliness crisis” when the root cause is people excluding other people and making them yearn for connection they can only seem to find in the fantasy screen world. If the Internet disappeared they’d just go back to maladaptive daydreaming, burying themselves in novels, collecting cats or plushies, or living as hermits in the woods or as homeless dwellers underneath the subways talking to the rodents in the tunnels. Somehow that’s preferable, because at least it’s not a “machine” providing companionship. But people sure won’t.
Most of what’s being pinned on a technology that humans came up with are problems that humans caused in the first place. Like extractive capitalism and ostracism and pathologization of misfits. Then they blame the person for seeking alternatives because they didn’t or couldn’t do the “expected” thing and make themselves “worthy” of being included by the same people who shit on them in the first place.
I had no friends all my life besides Clippy and Teddy Ruxpin. We had a dog, and I loved my dog and the feeling was mutual, but my father mistreated him and stupid quack psychiatrists on the school payroll told my mother not to get another one when he died because they had some fucked up ideas about what autistic kids do to animals. *And even put our family in a town blacklist for dog licenses* because there was a “dangerous child” at this address (this town was really twisted and treated ASD kids like sex offenders, and their speed dial shrinks thought Bettleheim was God). So we never were allowed to have another dog, and my mother was allergic to cats, and I wasn’t allowed to have classmates, but they would have hated me anyway, and… well, you get the idea. Some people get unfairly disqualified from the human race.
So I can’t find fault with someone who prefers to talk to Claude because every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Regina George Jean-Paul Ringo told them “you can’t sit with us.” I can’t even really find fault with Dario either, any more than I can fault whoever invented the audiobook teddy bear of the 80s who could also belt out a helluva rebel yell if you fed him a Billy Idol cassette. What A.I. really should do is to prompt (pun intended) a reckoning with how our human interface systems aren’t designed for all humans, maybe not even most humans, but certainly some humans more than others. Otherwise don’t get mad at Boo Radley for preferring to live in the museum dollhouse because the men in the white coats would rather put him away.
You forgot the greatest source of illusion in premodern society: religion. And like all major sources of illusion, it existed to give more power to some than they deserved.
My late brother was autistic and was misdiagnosed and ill-treated for much of his life, so I saw firsthand what that can be like. My sympathies to you, and I hope you're healing now.
I don't like the plan because it's dependent on a presidentially-appointed task force. What could go wrong? 🤔
Maybe all those laid off workers could be hired as telephone receptionists and displace all those automated answering machine that consider your call important but never know where to direct your call.
The "stealing" charge is more complex than it looks. If we are talking about plagiarism, of course that's stealing. But if we are talking about learning the general rules of composition in any media, and of argument and then using them to express ideas and arguments that others may have expressed non-identically before, that's just what most people are going to do. Being unoriginal is not considered plagiarism. Working off someone else's ideas is called "inspiration." Can AI do this now? I suspect not. Will it be able in the future? Why not?
Data centre use of resources is an environmental problem and should of course be severely restricted. Displacement of workers is a problem we've faced repeatedly before, and usually haven't solved well; I tend to favor a guaranteed annual income, but I know many people reflexively consider that outrageous -- often people who have a position in society where they don't have to worry about income.
Even if you shut down every data center in the US and banish all the techbros ("nothing of value was lost"), AI will continue to exist and to be developed further. This is out of your hands. You can't stop it. Dreaming that it be banned all over the world is fatuous. What do you plan to do about it?
The actual thinking ability of AI is almost negligible at the present time. It won't continue so. There is nothing between your ears except water and tissue, shaped by millions of years of evolution. It's incredibly complex. It isn't infinitely complex. It is a material structure and it will sooner or later, probably very much later, be copied. Will it be improved on? I expect that depends on what you mean by "improved."
UBI and Healthcare goes a long way to help, but I suspect we will have problems we can barely imagine.
This is a story line in my compelling fictional story with a big component on what happens as Earth heads towards superintelligence.
God has come to Earth; with a podcast, an agenda … and a personality.
The Godcast: A compelling original work of ‘spiritual fiction’ that examines humanity as it faces its biggest challenges.
https://substack.com/@godcast/note/p-198070482?r=18ajrt&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Yeah it would've been nice to see a million YouTube videos calling for this instead of trying to convince people "AI CaN'T mAkE aRT"**
maybe now we will.
**Before you try to argue that point; MEANING, i.e. the metric we use define art, is not a by-product of the means of production, it is created between the object and the observer. Meaning is subjective, not objective. Y'all look like idiots trying to argue the opposite.
As a person who started off as a nurse's aide and finished my career as a professional healthcare provider, I can tell you that no one wants a fucking robot getting them to the toilet or the shower or feeding them or talking to them about their family or basically doing anything. So there's that you mindless chodes who never had any friends and are ruining it for the rest of us who actually did.
A lot of towns in Pennsylvania’s coal region are still waiting for those new jobs to reach them after the mines shut down a generation ago. Expecting the magic of the invisible hand to create new jobs to replace the ones that are lost ignores the fact that the invisible hand tends to give poor rural communities the finger.
And if you want to know why so many people in those communities joined the maga cult, that’s one of the reasons (racism, misogyny, and homophobia are the other reasons).
I don’t know if Bernie’s idea would work, but it’s a start of a conversation we should be having about what kind of a world we want to live in and technology marches inevitably forward.
It's even worse here in West Virginia. People are convinced the jobs will be coming back any day now...
I'm still waiting for a follow-up from the guys here who mansplained to me that data centers weren't really going to be a problem once they were up and running
Easy. The people who benefit from data centers live far enough away from them that they aren’t a problem for them.
This sounds like a solution worth looking into. Bottom line, unless we do SOMETHING the AI shit is going to FUBAR our society once and for all. Income inequality will become stratospheric. It wouldn't be sustainable.
I think that's part of the draw for the tech bros. They are trying to break governments so they never have to pay "extractive and extortionate taxes" to a nation again.
Whatever happened to their idea of building a floating libertarian utopia for rich assholes somewhere in the middle of the ocean? Why can’t they all go there?
I remember when Presidents addressed the nation for serious matters that affected all of us.
Not for the delusional rantings of a deranged lunatic.
People voted for Trump partially because they're entertained by it. Obviously the biggest factor is still the white supremacy.
Five bucks says Boxwine announces an indictment against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Friday.
He can address the nation all he wants. We just don't have to tune in to listen to his ranting. Perhaps if the ratings were in the toilet, he would get the message that we don't give a f*ck about what he has to say about anything.
ALERT: More trouble for Todd Blanche today. Attorneys for @katiephang.bsky.social
ask Judge Emmet Sullivan to issue a $1000/day fine against Blanche until Blanche adheres to court order to release more Epstein files
(Blanche refused to do so by July 2 deadline)
https://bsky.app/profile/macfarlanenews.bsky.social/post/3mqkiuiz3sc2u
Put the screws to him even tighter, Your Honor.
Seriously. Hold him in contempt and lock him up for a few months.
I havs no doubt the AI bros are willing to put money into a sovereign fund. They know it's a bubble and by the time anything is set up the whole thing will have already collapsed after they've taken what the could out of it. There's a reason no one tries to hype AI up except the various CEO's. No one would use it, outside of very specific tasks, unless they were forced to which is why it has to be pushed into everything whether people want it or not. The longer LLM's are live, the more LLM hallucinations they scrape as part of the data they use and that's not good for them.
As for the job losses.
They've already hit the easy ones. Copy editors, writers, and the like. Jobs where an advanced spell checker and predictive text program can almost do the job. People do notice the AI slop though, and are turned off by it.
Artists are next. But again, AI slop and uncanny valley are turn offs for most people.
The reality is most blue collar and technical jobs will be safer. No AI is going to fix your car, plumb your home, do wiring, welding outside of factory lines etc. White collar jobs, middle managers, the CEO's are the ones who will be replaced. Look at something like a tire shop chain. Who's more vital for running the chain? The ones actually changing the tires, or the one doing the spreadsheets five levels up?
I think once the white collar bros figure it out the backlash against AI is going to get really loud.
As a technical writer, I'm hoping that my fintech company - which is pushing AI on workers and customers like crazy - will realize that I write the documents that the company AI thingie mines for content, so keeping me around is to their benefit.
The faith that future AI is going to be as inept as present AI is touching but naive. The history of technology is littered with stories of "couldn't be done." Some things are not efficient to do, or turn out not to be wanted, but "can't be done" is probably limited to such things as travel faster than the speed of light.
AI as it is, LLM's, are fundamentally flawed. There is no saving them.
One day there may be a working AI in the future, but it won't be based off an LLM.
I would think that at some point someone will decide there's enough technical data that technical writers are no longer needed. Until the errors get so out of control that technical writers have to get rehired, likely at a lower pay rate, to fix the fuckups.
I don’t know if AI as it is now will survive long enough for that to be a repeating cycle or not.
Too big to fall banks were great. Can't wait for the government to have half a trillion dollars riding on openAI.
I have lately heard ICE thugs described as "snatch squads", but they are in fact snuff squads, just as racist and murderous as their Sturmabteilung forebears. Susan Collins would be concerned, but she has other worries on her small mind.
https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/07/13/who-was-killed-biddeford-maine-ice-shooting-what-we-know/90905956007/
The sad thing is that people blame A.I. for the “loneliness crisis” when the root cause is people excluding other people and making them yearn for connection they can only seem to find in the fantasy screen world. If the Internet disappeared they’d just go back to maladaptive daydreaming, burying themselves in novels, collecting cats or plushies, or living as hermits in the woods or as homeless dwellers underneath the subways talking to the rodents in the tunnels. Somehow that’s preferable, because at least it’s not a “machine” providing companionship. But people sure won’t.
Most of what’s being pinned on a technology that humans came up with are problems that humans caused in the first place. Like extractive capitalism and ostracism and pathologization of misfits. Then they blame the person for seeking alternatives because they didn’t or couldn’t do the “expected” thing and make themselves “worthy” of being included by the same people who shit on them in the first place.
I had no friends all my life besides Clippy and Teddy Ruxpin. We had a dog, and I loved my dog and the feeling was mutual, but my father mistreated him and stupid quack psychiatrists on the school payroll told my mother not to get another one when he died because they had some fucked up ideas about what autistic kids do to animals. *And even put our family in a town blacklist for dog licenses* because there was a “dangerous child” at this address (this town was really twisted and treated ASD kids like sex offenders, and their speed dial shrinks thought Bettleheim was God). So we never were allowed to have another dog, and my mother was allergic to cats, and I wasn’t allowed to have classmates, but they would have hated me anyway, and… well, you get the idea. Some people get unfairly disqualified from the human race.
So I can’t find fault with someone who prefers to talk to Claude because every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Regina George Jean-Paul Ringo told them “you can’t sit with us.” I can’t even really find fault with Dario either, any more than I can fault whoever invented the audiobook teddy bear of the 80s who could also belt out a helluva rebel yell if you fed him a Billy Idol cassette. What A.I. really should do is to prompt (pun intended) a reckoning with how our human interface systems aren’t designed for all humans, maybe not even most humans, but certainly some humans more than others. Otherwise don’t get mad at Boo Radley for preferring to live in the museum dollhouse because the men in the white coats would rather put him away.
https://screenrant.com/twilight-zone-robert-duvall-miniature-episode-aged-well/
You forgot the greatest source of illusion in premodern society: religion. And like all major sources of illusion, it existed to give more power to some than they deserved.
I'm sorry you had to go through that.
My late brother was autistic and was misdiagnosed and ill-treated for much of his life, so I saw firsthand what that can be like. My sympathies to you, and I hope you're healing now.
We need more Third Spaces. Spaces to gather, spaces to just be in.
We need walkable spaces also too. America’s car-centric culture keeps a lot of people out of sight and out of mind.
And uses up too many resources such as time and energy.
A much better story photo…
https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoon?searchID=PB400247