I read a book once - i know, crazy right? - looking at Facebook's policies, strategies, and actions and reactions in relation to driving engagement and its algorithms. They know well what they are doing in regards to hate groups and driving opinions that veer into human rights abuses. If the profit motive is removed, as is the need for 'hours on platform' and engagement and feeding people the worst aspects of themselves back to themselves, then much of the malignancy is dampened if not removed. Even so, if we had nothing but benign platforms, I think that a) being always in contact with people is not necessarily a good thing as is claimed, and b) being in contact is not (necessarily) being connected, and fudging or confusing that is a problem in itself.
madcowoncrack
joined 4 weeks ago
Not exaggerating. Though not a keen student of history I'm not totally ignorant of it either. Germany was a caldron of political activity from 1918 until the Nazis took over, so one would think the average German would have been politically aware. In the US even active voters seem to be in a lala land head space that is hard to understand, one youtuber saying "I didn't like the direction the country was going." What does that even mean. Then there are those that "I don't do politics" and "whatever - as long as it doesn't effect me". The US is guiding into authoritarianism with hardly a struggle.
Not a tech bro but have watched a few channels of people who are:
First off a lot of people have jumped on ai in comments. So I will too. But to the question raised - if you are taking about "establishment/established tech bros" and if by 'jump on' you mean innovate then I say nothing. If you look at a lot of leading lights in all sort of fields a person often gets one idea and that makes their fortune - and the rest of their ideas are shit. Zuckerburg's metaverse anyone? This is true of companies too that appear to become ossified. Because, like you know - Widows 11 is orgasmic. So what orgasmic idea will come to the fore from some unknown: it is not possible to say because it will come from the unknown. All the sci-fi of 70 years ago thought it would be talking watches, no one guessed the phone would be the utilitarian tech.
However there are fads and forcing use and so on. So tech bros will jump on whatever is the next fad or thing that is forced into use (implanted microchips for id, 24 hour tracking, payments... social credit scores anyone? I mean its what the mobile phone is doing anyway).
To ai: imo we need to separate general ai, ie Chat GTP, deepseek etc from more narrowly trained ai use cases. The general ai have (almost) run out of data to (freely) train upon: in fact there is a worry that it's starting to eat itself - that is, ai is consuming ai generated content to train itself (ie mad ai): also the line on the graph is flattening as far as performance is concerned. AI that is trained for specific tasks however I feel is a different animal: think material sciences or cancer research. However in everyday use with a few years I can see you asking for a song that "is heavy with a punkish sound using violins about the folly of using a rotating wire brush as a masturbation tool" and there it is (though is it here now? I can't keep up). Depending on where these are (freeware, open commons, closed propriety) depends on what happens: Spotify/the music distributors could become totalising monopolies of music, or they could implode. In ten years you could be saying "make a film about a man scarred for life by said wire brush": sure it's take days and only be 360p to start ---- to start. Again creative commons or monopolies?
So: "It's a bit hard" DIY on personal computers, or "easy as the cloud" and marketed and convenient and just pay a monthly subscription: I think we all know the answer - because we are lazy and stupid:
That is why we will welcome the chip into our wrists.