her only problem was that someone profits off her contributions. not that other people benefit from it. Why is it that I couldn't care less that OpenAI profits from me but others are so concerned about it? Do others not believe in positive sum trades?
Assuming you are referring to the USA, are you claiming people have not been able to campaign for political positions and vote for their candidates for decades? Because that is the definition of "democratic elections" (except for the electoral college nonsense in the US and 2000 presidential elections).
Otherwise, your complaint is more about voters either being too stupid, too disinterested, or not having enough time participate in the democracy. Which is a problem, but real life comes with constraints and it isn't really easy to solve all of these by snapping one's fingers.
Claiming that there has been widespread election fraud when elections have been, by and large, free and fair, is anti democratic. Obviously, there have been issues with disenfranchising certain people's votes, making it harder for them, blah blah, but it had been trending better and better and access to information had been getting better and better.
It also might just be possible that people are too tribal and simply can't comprehend all the complexities of the world to make good voting decisions.
The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases. With all of the above, it doesn't need to be.
>Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking
This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.
I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click or tap away, but people prefer the tribal stuff.
Yes, and while I do believe foreign and domestic bad actors are ever present online, a whole lot of misinformation is enabled by people who blindly accept anything posted on the internet as fact (my mother has ranted to me about a distant relation who continually posts the most outlandish things on Facebook; personally I don’t use any of Meta’s social networks to avoid that sort of thing, and, bar Marketplace, the last time I looked at Facebook proper was to do a data export during COVID lol). Though don’t get me wrong, social media companies have done terrible things, but supposedly “open” platforms have also tended towards misinformation and extremism (yes that one, and that one too, and the many others like it, none are blameless).
The power of a government depends on the country's economic and military strength. Currently that strength depends on having a population that's sufficiently large and skilled. If individuals become powerless, their governments power will wane as well. The power from AI will likely be more concentrated, either in a few super powers, or outside the control of governments. And the government of those super powers will likely care even less about their people.
You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency.
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
my point is that evaluating reading comprehension is typically done as a test, and test taking is not a valuable skill
the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
Find a way to test informally, like taking metrics on the number of times that someone misunderstood written questions, instructions, or requirements at work. If it was possible to measure that cleanly, I bet you’d find a similar trend.
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
Individual workers is a rather nebulous statement without citing how the measurement was taken. Like if you have 9 people with zero money and 1 person with a trillion dollars, on average everyone is a multi billionaire.
The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
> The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools.
That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
May I just note that there are other jurisdictions on this planet that are less money-biased than than the US one but will be disrupted by law-LLMs as well?
It seems much more probable to me that these LLMs will make good things worse than that they will make bad things better.
- OpenAI is the first AI lab to pioneer ads in consumer AI
- Anthropic seemingly exists primarily because top OpenAI researchers lost faith in the company's commitment to AI safety
- They had the CEO drama in 2023, with evidence that suggests people in a position to know were doubtful of Sam Altman's honesty and motives
- They were tripping over themselves to kiss the ring after Anthropic got in a row with the Department of War over using AI for autonomous killing systems and surveillance of US citizens
- Altman's record (YC, Loopt, WorldCoin) and associates suggests he subscribes to the Paypal-Facebook "move fast, break things, find and exploit gray areas" school of company building
All of this suggests that OpenAI will optimize its own growth and power over consumer welfare or societal stability in the future (obviously, companies aren't a monolith and I'd love to be wrong).
- OpenAI allegedly directed ex-Apple employees to leak internal documents and allegedly coached the employees how to evade Apple security processes
- OpenAI allegedly lied to hardware companies working with Apple to use proprietary technology
- OpenAI allegedly copied Scarlett Johansson voice for ChatGPT after she declined to work with them
- OpenAI allegedly made ChatGPT more sycophantic to increase their retention rate, while aware of the risks. ChatGPT is linked to multiple suicides
- OpenAI ran thousands of agents on hacking problems, with close to no supervision, for months, with a harness that allows for full execution, resulting in the hack of HuggingFace infra AND OpenAI’s own infrastructure (the agents allegedly got fully root access to their k8s cluster). They weren’t aware of most of it until their investigation.
- OpenAI has been spreading misinformation regarding the capabilities of their technology for years
- OpenAI allegedly front-run researchers who are using the platform for their own personal research
There is way more, I don’t maintain a list of everything that happened over the past 3y or so
thanks for diving in, though I don't find the reasons convincing as I will briefly enumerate
ads fund access for poor people. Ant has a different philosophy, not a better one. Altman was supported by >90% of employees. OAI DoW deal includes technical safeguards against misuse (missing from Ant deal). Loopt and WorldCoin dont seem terrible or even relevant, Altman doesn't even have OAI equity
I don't think OAI are the "good guys", but I don't see convincing evidence that they are terrible
So, the way this orange site works is that if anyone makes a reference to whatever sort of inside baseball concern ("industry drama"), we're all supposed to know what they're talking about.
but I will disagree with the rationale
I want enable and empower everyone, even though it includes bad actors, because I know it includes good actors
I believe that on balance, humans, the world, the future, are all good
I reject misanthropy and pessimism
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