Facebook actually became my preferred social site for a month or two recently - I had a relatively fresh account and managed to direct the algorithm towards mostly serving me interesting archeology, local groups, and some cute pet videos.
Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.
Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.
There are better forums than facebook for things like archeology, local groups, and pet videos. However everybody does them on Facebook these days and so we are stuck...
I gave up on facebook when it decided I wanted to see borderline child porn (the girl was wearing a diaper and positioned as if about to nurse from the topless mom - it might not meet the definition of child porn but it obviously trying to sit just above that line). When reported I was told the group is fine by Facebook's standards. But it isn't fine by mine.
There was a really great writeup by someone who worked in that Disney animation shop on a blog I once stumbled on - he wrote about how he took on the 'job of a lifetime' as a teenager while his mother was terminally ill and how that impacts your priorities.
Incredibly moving read that I unfortunately can't find now, but it covered how the Sydney office ended, from memory it was a combination of CGI changing the industry, and cost - Australian wages weren't cheap and the studio was mostly used for producing direct-to-video sequels which was a market that dried up.
The actual big influence on the Australian-American cross pollination though, I suspect, was Rupert Murdoch's expansion into the American film and TV industry. For all his faults, he was a big champion of talent from his homeland in both his movies and Fox TV network. Even the infamous Simpsons Australia episode was likely influenced by the big influence of Australians at Fox at that time.
Not to be too pessimistic, but it strikes me that in a worst case scenario, severing a cable might scale to severing global digital communications which is itself a massive worst case scenario even if we removed AI from the picture.
If the worst case outcome is we have to even temporarily shut down global shipping, banking, transport, health services, communications and national infrastructure to contain a self-propagating misaligned AI that can evolve itself and work its way into any sufficiently large computer system to escape humans preventing it from finishing its task, that seems like something we should be trying very hard to avoid.
All I know is that in the 80s a scientist I respect predicted that coral would be bleached by changing global climate on a specific timeline which turned out to be spot on, and his advice then and now was that we need to seriously curb carbon emissions to avoid worse outcomes for life on earth. Until someone opposed to this suggestion comes up with a prediction equally as long range and impressive I'm afraid I can't really take their protests too seriously.
It does seem bizarre that major AI development (and autonomous robot development) hasn't been nationalised yet and treaties drafted up around producing it. Commercial incentives just seem totally at odds with the public good when it comes to controlling and regulating something like this.
Even if not for the sake of avoiding a mitigable disaster, there's a huge benefit in simply pacing development so as to not completely freak out society as they stare down the barrel of mass job market changes without time to adapt or prepare. Nobody wants to live in a world where they might wake up in a month and find their entire industry has been automated overnight.
We've tackled much bigger global issues successfully in the past and the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line. It seems like the biggest issue is belief in the right of governments to govern.
> the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line
The US absolutely could coerce the rest of the West in the short term, but everything that's happened in the last decade calls the long-term future of Atlanticism into serious question and such action would accelerate this process I think. If coordination came as an order from Uncle Sam, it would be seen not as a legitimate act of ensuring collective safety but as mere technological imperialism on America's part.
It's not exactly trained on a neutral set of data. Engagement algorithms have ensured that a good chunk of content on the web these days is inflammatory and skewed towards the extreme (in fact in the last few months a good portion of the world has actually deemed it illegal for kids to consume because this content is so damaging to a developing brain).
The trick I started using for those infinite scroll apps (that are basically digital crack) is that I made a pact that I had to close the app the moment something appeared that was obviously trying to make me angry, upset or indignant.
It was initially an attempt to train the algorithms away from emotionally exploitation, but for the most part that was never fixed while my screen time dropped to almost zero.
As an upside I'm now also much more aware when a post is trying to manipulate my emotions, and I've come to realise how a majority of reddit posts are designed to undermine basic faith in society and your fellow humans. Horrifying to think about the implications, but glad I at least have a personal handle on it now.
This is what killed Gemini for me. The model might well be great, but the ecosystem Google has built around them is a confusing maze of not-quite-there products.
As a hobbyist teen I built my own itunes clone for PC from scratch and remember getting so excited when Apple posted a job for someone to port iTunes officially.
I remember getting so excited, then depressed when I realised a hobbyist teenager could never compete with the people Apple would have applying. Later seeing how bizarrely bloated iTunes for PC turned out, guess I probably could have.
Australia's competition watchdog sued Google over this about 10 years ago, and lost the case on appeal. Google's winning argument was that it was the ad buyers that were responsible for breaking the law, not Google who were just acting as a conduit.
I'm not really convinced these kinds of "we're just the platform" arguments stack up that well anymore when we see the harm these kinds of unregulated platforms have done to society. Unfortunately though the precedent is already set, so it will be fairly had to backtrack.
Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.
Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.
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