This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
We don't have to let it, but we probably will anyway. There are a ton of people trying to push some crazy revelations end times scenario on us.
I've said for a long time my retirement plan is there won't be one, and it's starting to seem like that's really going to happen, just not in the way I imagined. We live in the absolute stupidest timeline right now.
His face makes me uncomfortable
This is just more sales strategy
Really going for that sociopath/pychopath/fascist/nazi/flock demographic.
Their sales strategy is built on their researchers quitting? Like I get the internal tension between biz and engineering but that seems far fetched.
Is that too far removed from reality to imagine given the payout they're trying to get?
Yes it is. I’ve worked in senior leadership teams for years - it’s just not viable to think something like that would stay contained.
"We sincerely believe the technology we're building could destroy humanity"
Excellently business strategy
The real danger isn't a smart AI - the smartest people don't end up being in charge of our societies. The real danger is having enough control to be able to con most of our society, and seeing how much our societies are willing to continue participating in clearly compromised special interest social networks, I don't have a lot of faith. Barely a difference if humanity is replaced or just led to the lowest common denominator of exploitation at that point, and that's where we are heading politically.
If I were an alien invader, with superior technology, and I was trying to exterminate an indigenous species without getting my hands dirty (or from far away), I might plant something similar to the current LLM/AI + military robots craze.
Consider reading the book "Roadkill", by Dennis E Taylor
There's more than one movie about aliens who use global warming to wipe out humanity. AI data centers seem to be doing just that in more than one way. No need for an alien invader though, even a primitive species adapted for all the nooks and nuances of the environment is far more adept at it, it just needs to be diseased.
Distribute free sex robots and humanity would depopulate within two generations. Even better if the humans don’t know they are robots and believe they are an actually human who the humans think they are in a legitimate relationship with. Zero bloodshed takeover.
Blade Runner End Game
There are also rumors, which may be untrue, of a Majestic 12 committee making deals with aliens in exchange for tech. It may be that advances in semi-conductor technology are the "trojan horse," with AI being a natural and probable consequence of that which was genuinely discovered after the chip advances or with AI first being developed by government and then leaked to the public later via papers and then commercially made public, with the end result making the earth uninhabitable for humans. We also don't know if aliens and UFOs are merely biological life/advanced travel or if they are some sort of technological/bio hybrid. It's also possible that these are crazy rumors made up by people who can't fathom science. I understand the statistical and computational logic of AI, so that doesn't seem that crazy to me, but sudden semi-conductor advances seem impossible to fathom; but I could just be ignorant. One flaw in an analysis like this is that even without UFOs, aliens, and computers, humans were doing a great job of exponentially obliterating the normal natural environment just based on pollution emissions from cars and other processes.
Who knows?
And yet, they just keep going. I will never understand these people.
Greed is one hell of a drug.
It must be. Because these weird fuckers don't even seem to have hobbies.
They are simply not in the same league as Einstein, Oppenheimer and Russel.
I ain't sure they're even in the same league as Ron Popeil.
That's actually pretty interesting. I only knew him for those old RonCo infomercials.
Because if they don't, someone else will. Their logic is: If somebody is going to burn down the world, it may as well be me!
I genuinely think that they (and conservatives overall) don't understand that everyone is different and that most people aren't our there trying to get one up on everyone else.
100%. Either they don't understand, or they're in on the con.
"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response." - Elon Musk
I'm convinced that he just needed a good ass kicking when he was 18. I think that would have gone a long way towards squashing that overinflated ego.
unfortunately, if you are big enough as a corporation, by definition you are that kind of organization, or you would not be where you are.
we are ruled by sociopaths who crave power wealth and fame. we are doomed.
Every time I see Dario, he reminds me of Pat from the 90s movie:
Just another case of genAI psychosis not too dissimilar to the one gøøgle employee who maybe a year or two back thought their genAI was alive. I'm infinitely more worried we will destroy ourselves due to climate change caused by the AI data centers long before genAI even has the ability to think on its own.
Yeah you are not going to get general AI from an LLM. What would destroy the world is people not thinking and letting these LLMs blindly make choices. Oh wait, yeah we might be fucked.
From the creator of Don't Create The Torment Nexus comes a new tale: Stop Building The Thing That Could Kill Us All
I can kinda see it the way it's been shoved into weapons, in the end ai is rogue code
Everybody is in competition with each other. We can only stop if we can convince everybody else to stop too. If these truly are weapons of mass destruction, no country wants to be the only one without it.
Doomers unite.
Remember folks, we are a spec on a dot in the universe. It will all be ok.
Both mindsets are dumb, one ignores the danger, the other is paralized by fear.
I think it's time to start discussing what steps we can take from this point onward. People are, including myself are tired of being treated like a fucking worm in this system and all I see is unify, let's unify, it's time that we unify... What are the steps we can actually take? I wrote in another topic I can teach people how to go after PayPal and other big tech hypocrites through regulatory bodies that I got positive results from. Let's discuss what we can do destroy the public image of these two faced criminals. They can always earn more money, but you can't buy public image with your money, remember guys.
Actually looking at practical, realistic solutions instead of just targeting whatever company or CEO you've heard bad things about would probably result in better outcomes long term. I see a lot of pure "anti-tech" sentiment around which although understandable isn't really going to fix anything because at the end of the day the technology exists, Pandora's box has been opened and you will always have a share of people who will NOT stop using it, for whatever reason.
If you boycott PayPal it's just going to be replaced by an equivalent service by some other company that might seem better at first but will eventually enshittify like all the other ones. The same could be said about any LLM/AI company. Or any social media company.
I believe to actually "solve" these issues we need regulation. Companies will not stop chasing profits and they won't stop building data centers just because a minority of people on Lemmy really hate it. Humanity will not simply forget that AI exists just because we "collectively" agree to do so. That didn't work for the nuclear bomb or global warming, so why would we expect it to work now? On the other hand, if we actually accept that the tech is there now we can actually invest our energy in making the tech compatible with our society (and the planet).
Deprivatize data centers, put them entirely under government oversight and provide strict environmental regulations. Make AI a public utility and require full transparency from its providers. Finance public research of AI and its effects. We should focus on this unless we want to just see a replay of net neutrality and social media algorithms where the companies responsible for doing a huge amount of damage to our society only get a slap on the wrist 10-15 years from now when everyone has already accepted the idea that you can't have AI without capitalism. Because that idea is exactly the illusion that these companies are trying to sell right now, but it's simply not the truth.
Using regulatory bodies to fine these companies is exactly what I meant in my previous comment if it was not clear. I was able to get some positive results on the way, through the FTC, CFPB, and DFPI just to name a few, and discovered many others who blatantly break the law, including government/political organs such as the European Parliament's ASK EP unit, and the European Banking Authority, SOLVIT not reading complaints properly, etc. If there is a demand, I can make a huge list of regulatory bodies, how to contact them, how to write your complaint legally by citing the law so your complaints are actually taken seriously, and so on. These methods are all free to do and take 10 minutes to fill out per body.
I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but my issue with comments like yours is stating, 'Yeah, we should do something, take the regulatory way!' but it only stays in theory. It never explains the practical steps a user can take. My direct question for you would be: What is a practical step that anyone, or at least most of us, can do as of now?
Most people are screaming into the void. There are countless complaints about PayPal freezing people's accounts without any legal justification, and Google locking people out of their accounts due to 2FA. These are all illegal. For instance, if you are in the EU, you can file a complaint against PayPal through the Central Bank of Ireland, since that's where they hold their license, and with enough volume, you can get their license revoked.
The FTC and consumer protection laws explicitly state that you cannot force a user to prove ownership of their account using only one method. Yet, Google does it. If you lose access to your Patreon account, they ask you weird questions like, 'When was the last time you withdrew your Patreon funds to your PayPal?' Who the heck takes a note of that? If you lose access to your Outlook, Microsoft sends you a form asking for the exact IP address you used to connect to your account.
These are all administrative, illegal barriers. You could be mute, you could be deaf, you are legally not obligated to buy a phone and a SIM card, or maybe you just don't want to talk on the phone, or you have social anxiety. There are solutions out there, and I have gotten results through regulatory complaints many times. Some took a short time, some are still in progress, and I am well aware that for some, I will need to take their asses to court.
Regardless, we need unification, because as I said before, take Irish law for example: if you make a confidential complaint, and unfortunately, filing a complaint against PayPal through Irish regulatory channels falls under this category (I won't dive into the technical details), they can literally say to your face, 'We got your complaint, but cannot share anything further with you.' How is a citizen supposed to know that they actually took action?
The European Parliament is blatantly breaking their own transparency laws. For example, during formal correspondences, their personnel never give out their name to avoid individual liability. I made a post about this today. You can start a petition against this directly inside the EP (This can be done online too! For free!), and take this matter to the ECJ (this one is a bit tricky, because you need a literal lawyer for this). You wrote to Amnesty, who claims to defend human rights, and didn't get a response from them? There are government bodies investigating this shit, but the information is not easily accessible. At best, it is written in such a way that it is very easy to get confused about how to file the complaint. If government is not making it easy for us to access these info, we MUST make it easy for others depending on our knowledge, so everyone knows they have places to go and file complaints and their voices to be heard. Practical steps.
Complaining anywhere, be it on Lemmy or another social media platform, will not change anything. At least not with 200 people. People need to get their asses off the couch and start filing legal complaints, and protest if necessary; flood social media one by one against whoever is breaking the law, EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN THEY until we get the results, so that big tech cannot even censor this shit even if they wanted to. The issue always relies on people being unhappy but not taking action, even if it means filling out a simple form.
I do understand that we are constantly pumped with, 'Ah, nothing is gonna change even if I complain.' The thing is, yeah, it will not if we scream into the void. We gotta complain legally by directly citing the law, which I can help with and create guidelines for, since all of these companies break very specific laws every single time. For example, Epic Games, Bandcamp support, Patreon, Ubisoft, any gamer knows about these companies, and these are all breaking transparency laws by not sharing personnel names with you, the moment you contact their support channels. They also force you to use webforms, so they can get rid of that paper trail, if you decide to file a complaint against them later, just to name a few.
If there is a demand, I wouldn't mind sitting down all day and creating a detailed guide on which regulatory body you can go to, how to file your complaint, and how to do it. What would you suggest doing practically, for example? Any ideas are welcome, we can always iterate, and someone else can come up with something better, but we do need to start taking action at this point.
We gotta start taking these actions in volume, not just a few people.
A bit of background story on how I got involved in all of this, if you are wondering: I was living in Mannheim, Germany previously, and was kidnapped and assaulted by the Polizeirevier Neckarstadt-Mannheim police department, who literally dumped me onto the street after the kidnapping with nothing. No IDs, no glasses, no shoes, no underwear, no keys, nothing. I got my official assault report, literally stating everything I say here is correct; medical personnel called the police station, confirmed I was there, and put it on the official assault report that I was indeed dumped onto the street without my glasses or shoes.
When I was in the cell, these police officers forced me to sign a paper, which I did not, and they threatened me that they would come to my home again, which they did. I recorded where they could not show any IDs, could not state any legal grounds for why they were in my bedroom, and so on. You know what happened when I tried to take this matter to court? NOTHING. German judges did not even start the court case. These same police officers stole my phone on the first day where I recorded all of their hate crimes, which I proved with GPS logs and direct satellite recordings, but nothing has happened. These things happened on June 26 and 27, 2026. No investigation, no nothing.
I am coming from a military background, so I know my rights and I knew what to do in a stressful situation like this. But what about other immigrants? When you share these stories, people look at you like you're an alien, or when you complain about how PayPal isn't giving you your own money, they immediately switch to, 'Forget about that money, you'll never get it back,' which honestly disappoints me, seeing how easily people can be tricked by the government.
There is so much we can do. There are many people here from so many different fields and areas of expertise; we could really ignite something that could lead to something big. Nobody needs to go through what I went through, and I bet you also went through some shitty situations where you knew you were wronged, but the system left you alone, or wasn't there as much as it actually could be. I don't want anyone to feel this way.
The universe will be ok. But what about me?! I'd at least like to be a cautionary tale!
I think you got that covered already.
juhst kiddn
