Technology

The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.

There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone is smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.

It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.

Investors are starting to notice that it’s all smoke and mirrors in terms of the profits. I am reasonably sure it will pop this year. I will be utterly shocked if it doesn’t pop by the end of next year. It’s just so comically and obviously unsustainable.

This is gonna go down as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, I swear.

I dunno, the GameStop Bros are still waiting for MOASS. So I'd say the wealthy have more ways to keep the plates spinning than we wish they did.

You can't determine what knowledge will be useful or valuable to someone in the future. Archaeologists have poured over receipts and shopping lists from ancient Egypt that were thrown away. It's why the Internet Archive backs up all the random webpages they do. There's no justification for mass destruction of books, especially since it's being done to train broadly useless LLMs.

Of course they won't be releasing these books later on. These companies want to hoard this text data so their competitors can't access it. It would also be illegally distributing copyrighted work. Aside from destructive scanning being faster, the fact that a book is destroyed makes the digital copy "transformative" and therefore legal if it isn't further copied or distributed. A judge ruled on this recently. I don't mean to advocate for copyright enforcement, but that's the reality here.

I think China has a national repository of AI training data that companies can access if they contribute to it as well. Doing the same thing in the West would at least blunt some of the harm the AI craze is causing, but that would have made too much sense.

As his faculties return, Robert (who has always been technophobic) must adapt to a different world, where almost every object is networked and mediated-reality technology is commonplace.

…

However, jitter and latency are considerable problems with this basic network when long distances are involved. In the novel, Robert Gu develops an algorithm that partially compensates for these technical deficiencies, and might ultimately allow the inclusion of haptics.

This feels like it would be a little Mary-Sue to me, but I haven’t read the book. Is that transition handled well?

That would imply preserving the original. No, they are having their AIs revise history and its literature to whatever they deem 'acceptable' in their new world order, hence the rampant book banning spree they've been on as of late.

They're working on it :/

I hate that I started to wish for the deaths of people I don't even know outside of news coverage, but that's what it takes unfortunately