I have less issue with a founder's decision to invest in an unproven market than I do with a VC or PE fund choosing to dole out money to those founders because those investors are convinced that they can win big if they pick the right horse. You're gambling your time and livelihood that you succeed, sure; hopefully you have a solid business plan. But the people around you are gambling (probably with other people's money) that you make them fabulously wealthy.
That's pretty much what I would expect from Chase Bliss. They make very cool, high quality, and often niche audio products. Small production runs made in North America come with a high price tag.
> Drought and heat will also begin to make some parts of the world unlivable, and people will migrate out of necessity, which given the current political climate, you know how that will go.
It's worth noting that this is already happening. Outmigration from the Central American "Dry Corridor" is on the rise, and a growing number of migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border over the past decade have been from countries that overlap the dry corridor (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). Major droughts in the late 20-teens required millions of people to turn to food aid. The thing is, it's hard to see the connection to climate change because it's surrounded by other factors. The region has millions of rural residents who rely on farming for their income or food, so are they leaving for climate-related reasons, crime-related reasons, or reasons of economic opportunity? The answer of course is that many of these factors are intertwined. I think we imagine that one day we'll wake up in Mad Max world and until then, climate change isn't yet a disaster. And while there probably will be a day when some disaster creates an immediate, horrible refugee crisis, the day-to-day reality is probably more like today: a trickle of people moving from areas that are slowly getting less and less habitable as time goes on, gradually putting stress on the system.
That dry corridor has suffered from lots of deforestation. Their pop grew by leaps and bounds since the green revolution and that led to lots of clearing of forest for farmlands which when managed poorly lead to soil erosion combined with fewer trees means more land cleared leading to "dry corridors." So, pop growth was/is a major input.
Well, they are, but if a surveillance state exists, then one thing that will save the ordinary citizen from its gaze is that humans have a limited amount of attention. A massive intelligence complex full of analysts can only process a fraction of the intelligence that a fleet of AI agents can handle. So now you have the worst of both worlds: the massive capabilities of modern AI at the behest of humans who have shown they can't be responsible with that capability.
State capacity has always been the bottleneck for authoritarian regimes. China can't keep track of who is even a citizen or not in many cases simply because having a national database doesn't get rid of the birthday problem + the limited number of common surnames + the administrative state's limited capacity to process data that until recent decades came in handwritten + a unsurprising amount of petty corruption that adds up. If you start with bad data there's no magic bullet. And the data is always bad to start with. The spectre of "birth tourism" only works on the Chinese side because through quotidian corruption someone without Chinese citizenship can be made into one by a civil servant of sufficient rank, which is also why it's not a real problem - not enough people actually have that level of connection within the bureaucracy. The US by definition cannot have an accurate database of even who's a citizen - thanks to repeated changes in citizenship laws from the 60s through the 90s that was then frozen around 9/11 as well as the lack of a coherent system that is accurate, immutable, and can act as an oracle. Home births were not just a western thing (although it certainly happens more often on a per capita basis out here, I'm in Nevada). SSNs are not indicators of citizenship, nor are driver's licenses. I spent most of my 20s in NYC where none of my friends who grew up in the city had a driver's license and the state DL/ID wasn't REAL ID compliant until after I left. We only have vaguely reliable data from Texas but ICE, the presumptive arbiter of documentation validity (not part of their mandate), has an error rate of 1% that they admit to, but that's after immigration court and appeals and administrative actions ameliorated their error rate down to 1%. At this point we are removing US citizens and rendering them stateless almost casually, almost as policy.
AI is trained on these flaws. These aren't flaws that can easily be fixed. The ramifications can be significant. Garbage in, garbage out. Records, however official, are wrong all the time. I have an entry in my "criminal record" from a clerical error that is attached to no charges but 4 days in LA County Men's where I had a seizure, which can be interpreted as the record being correct but incomplete or a giant screwup. What sort of process would it take to fix this if the AI decided on the latter? It doesn't affect me, but someone less privileged? Absolutely it will have consequences. Worst of both worlds indeed. People routinely forget that LLMs ARE NOT PEOPLE. Mistakes get compounded. Biases if not caught in time get baked in. There are multiple AI safety dialogues that should be happening but you wouldn't know it from the media, and it's the wrong one that is front and center. You can rotate keys, you can roll out patches, you can't open up the corpus and use a scalpel and cut out the errors and omissions and biases, and the latter aren't logged.
We don't have enough people who possess professional expertise in widely varied fields that nevertheless intersect in the conversation. This might be because there aren't many people that fit the descriptor, but these are the blindspots. Anyone talk to Orin Kerr lately?
I'm lost... are you trying to argue that it would be ok for naturalized citizens of a country to be forcibly removed from the country where they hold citizenship if that country decides that they're the "wrong" race? On what planet is that ok?
1. Whether that is OK or not is unrelated to the question of whether it is racist to revoke citizenship on non-racial grounds. Which it clearly is not. (The "...the wrong race" is purely you).
2. As far as I can see, the position that DHH referred to did not apply to naturalized citizens, but to foreigners. So non-citizens.
3. As far as I know, most countries currently have laws on the books that can result in citizenship being revoked. As an example, countries that don't allow dual citizenship will take your citizenship away if you become citizen of another country. Germany and many other countries will take your citizenship away if you lied on your application and it only comes out later. Terror and treason are also common reasons.
4. Some counties (India for example) will even take your (naturalized) citizenship away if you are out of country long enough.
We are not uncomfortable with what the art is saying but with what the meta-narrative around the art is saying, and I think that's an important distinction. Sometimes context is an important part of artistic interpretation and expression, but this time around I think the discomfort is that human intention is being replaced by a machine.
> If not, where do we draw the line?
I don't find this question uncomfortable at all: art is art if and only if it was made by humans, end to end. Human thought informing human action resulting in a human-created work. If you involved an AI, it is not art; it is a facsimile of art. If you agree that conveying emotion and meaning is an important part of art, and I think you do since you highlighted that art can and sometimes should be uncomfortable, then I posit that AI "art" cannot be art because there is no feeling, emotion, or creativity involved in its creation. An AI can only attempt to mimic human expression based on its training while the AI itself is incapable of these things.
> art is art if and only if it was made by humans, end to end
I disagree with your definition of art. One can use AI as a reference and the end result will still be art because it'll carry execution technique and the subjective perception of the artist. Saying otherwise would be like saying that electronic music isn't music because it's a computer producing the sound waves.
A better candidate would be "an object can be a work of art if and only if it wasn't made by machines end to end".
Ha, that is a fair critique. Now, I do consider electronic music to be art; in that case, I consider the computer or synthesizer to be an instrument, and thus the creative output of a DAW is still the artist's creative output. There is definitely some sloppiness in how I defined my terms; unfortunately, I'm just not going to commit my afternoon to an iron-clad definition of art for an internet comment.
I understand, and we need to have good faith to navigate wonky definitions, because impeccable definitions aren't a prerequisite for productive conversation.
I think it's a spectrum. DJing can go from hitting play with someone else's recorded live set to sampling live from vynil and midi controllers and mixing with voice, doing loops and the likes.
I think there is room for art in anything, including AI. Just like musicians like DJ Shadow managed to show it's perfectly possible to make great pieces using only sampling, I think we can go very far with AI generated art and still be able to call it art in good faith.
The NSF's focus areas do include research on people and society, as well as development of new training and education initiatives (https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/education) and fostering a robust STEM workforce (https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/workforce). Not every grant issued by the NSF needs to be geared towards fundamental scientific research; the NSF's mission is broad, and intentionally so.
Yeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?
I agree that it won't be an unbiased source of information, but should be roughly same level of trustworthiness as clicking on the link and reading the information on the advertiser's website.
Nintendo seems to be the outlier in the video games industry in that they are very much willing to foster talent over a long term. People who started doing sprite work 35 years ago are still there today and directing games. It's almost like the secret to long-term success is developing a roster of highly-skilled professionals, rather than treating your staff as disposable.
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