I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.

Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.

Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.

This could be considered a trojan.

I love the idea!

The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.

The sad thing is that the corporate sociopaths who made the bad decisions all made huge amounts of money doing it. The fact that they destroyed the company means nothing to them. And it will not mean anything to the next corporations that hire those same people as executives.

I love this image, but you know that Clippy would be holding the gun sideways, gangster style.

The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.

I’ve just been looking for something to replace One Note. The timing of this announcement worked out really well for me. :-)

Thanks!

Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.

That seems to imply that Facebook and Elon are not terrorists. I could make a reasonable argument for Facebook. Elon, I think, has already established his credentials with multiple acts that have led to riots and other violence.

Thank you! That was very useful.

I’ve been using Nova for a very long time. It has saved me all kinds of annoyance as I’ve switched phone brands and OS versions, since my basic UI has remained consistent.

Unless it actually takes a dive in quality, I will continue to use it, but this is disappointing news.

Company that makes Mice: Hey, what if we actually built a good mouse!

Take a look at the suggestions in this article: https://www.lifewire.com/stop-alexa-from-listening-5121012

If you disable the microphone, except when you want to use it, that should severely limit what it can do. If you also set the option that tells Amazon not to keep any of your recordings that should keep you fairly safe.

The caveat is that Amazon can decide to cheat at any time. They have repeatedly lied about what information that acquire, how long they retain it, and what they do with it. At the moment, they don’t seem to be cheating on the Echo functions, but that could change at any time with an invisible firmware update. There isn’t anything you can do about this except to be aware of the possibility.

It is definitely worth using the privacy options they offer, even if they aren’t enforced through hardware.

Titanium and carbon fiber, not iron. This isn’t the middle ages.

This seems like a useful tool. Thanks!

I try very hard to buy everything on physical media. I subscribe to a few streaming services, but I never buy non-physical media. You don’t really own anything that can suddenly disappear because a company changes policies, get bought, or goes out of business.

Everything I buy is then ripped and stored on my local media server. That makes them more convenient and allows me to store the physical media out of the way. If something goes wrong, I can always re-rip.

It is worth noting that optical discs age and can become unreadable over time. If that happens, I can always go in the opposite direction and burn a new disc from my digital copy.

Taking an absolute stand may be comforting, but it has not and will not actually accomplish anything.

Our existing system is broken. Our current choice is between continuing with it, and trying to influence, or exchanging it for an authoritarian government run by a vindictive child. In the long run there may be other options, but right now you aren’t going to get a third choice. One or the other of those outcomes is going to happen.

Trump has said, at various times, that he would enact violence against protesters, have them arrested and held without due process, or have them deported. How effective do you think your efforts to push for more progressive government policies are going to go under those conditions?

Burning it all down sounds good in theory, but nothing happens in a vacuum. If we allow the current system to fail it is not going to be replaced with an idealized new system. It is going to be replaced by whatever existing movement is in a position to assert itself. Right now, that is will be the right-wing authoritarians.