Actually that's my initial reaction, too, but I do think there might be some kind of solution. On third thought I'm sure this is not it, but...

If (and that's actually a huge IF) we were able to model the atmosphere well enough, then I think we might be able to intervene in a sane way. My own favorite fantasy solution would be large arrays of orbital mirrors rotated as needed to control the solar energy reaching the earth. Take a bit off the sides here, add some extra crops there...

Time for a joke? We could use the mirrors to FINALLY get rid of DST. And if we had that atmospheric model we could do it without the adverse side effects...

Dibs on "Donaldian Decadence".

If the YOB implodes soon enough, then we can hope that 2025 goes down in history as "The Year of Donaldian Decadence".

#DonaldianDecadence

Or what's your better historical label for what happened?

Provocative FP, but I think you're mostly wrong and lacking in the kind of insight that will lead towards any solution. Most obviously, the Democrats are not going to solve anything. I think we are actually in a situation where too much change has become a key problem, so controlling and even limiting the changes are crucial. I sort of hate to say it, but I think the Amish may have it right when they consider newfangled ideas carefully before adopting them. (The Amish religious stuff mostly seems bogus, however...)

As regards the monopoly problem, I think the best solution approach might be a progressive tax on profits where higher degrees of monopolization result in higher taxes on the associated profits. The "natural" path to higher retained earnings would then be for the monopolist to divide itself into honest competitors. Three metrics (plus your ideas) could be used to detect the monopoly: (1) Limited customer choice and too few meaningful options, (2) Inability of wannabe competitors to enter the monopoly niche, and (3) Lack of alternative employment options for people working in the niche. But "We can't get there from here." Certainly there are no politicians who are trying to lead in such a direction.

Returning to this story I think the actual key is in the deltas. Yes, Amazon does need engineers, but profit maximization calls for keeping ONLY the engineers who can produce the highest rates of profit increase. All less productive engineers are just slowing things down. The delusion that Amazon is now suffering from is an idea that AI (and related IT) can be used to replicate the work of the delta-maximizers all over the place.

The reality is different and I expect to be amused by the implosion--even though I will also probably suffer from some of the collateral damage.

Requoted against the censor trolls with mod points. I should ditto several following related comments, but Slashdot isn't worth that much effort these years.

My top candidates just now:

1. It's just a joke.

2. I'm just asking questions. (Most relevant to this story.)

3. AI is good.

So what's your favorite?

In my typically verbose way, I feel like a few words of clarification are called for. Also another attempted joke or two?

The first one is mostly frequently abused as an excuse for bad behavior, including speech behaviors. In particular, there are many lies that used to be taken as proof of character flaws, but now they are just spun away. In orange particular, "The president was only joking" is no excuse for a job that ain't supposed to be so funny it makes you sick. (Which actually comes back to the theme of the Slashdot story at hand.)

The second one is most damaging as an epistemological attack on the nature of truth itself. It's actually a good thing that science does ask questions, but the goal of scientific questions is to learn more, not to destroy the idea that we know anything at all. Perfect knowledge should not be the ultimate enemy of trying to learn anything at all on the excuse that our knowledge ain't perfect. As if there were any perfect scientists (or politicians), now or ever.

Now about my newish third candidate, the problem is with "good". Options that are closer to the truth might be "AI is a tool too easily used as a weapon" or even "AI is nothing" because it's the human beings who use things, even including AI things.

Just had another encounter with an AI entrepreneur yesterday. Language-related application should have caught my interest, but his money-centric attitude lost it. My bad. What else should I have expected at a VC gathering? The main reason he was there was in hopes of getting some of that sweet, sweet cash and I should congratulate him on his tight focus. (A-hole joke time?)

Back to the AI threat. I suppose the main angle for this story should be examples of AI slop attacking vaccines in particular and the CDC in general. Too depressing to websearch for some examples, and you can get AI help if you want some. I'm more focused on the GAIvatar threat. I considered "GAIvatar are harmless" as my third candidate, but the portmanteau is not frequent and I've been unable to find any standard usage describing generative AI used to imitate specific people. Rarely they may offer a few bits about chatting with a fake Einstein or an AI ghost of a grandparent. Recently read an interesting SF story about solving a major math conjecture with the aid of an AI postmortem copy of a deceased father...

So I used to focus on the use of individual GAIvatars to predict and control individuals (though carefully crafted and targeted prompts). But now I'm wondering about creating a group GAIvator to predict and control the behaviors of an entire class of people. It could even become a kind of circular definition, where group membership is defined on a sliding scale based on how closely a particular candidate member conforms to the GAIvator's predictions and prompts.

So have a nice Friday?

Me? I'll take my chances with the vaccines. Much better odds than they'll give me in Vegas or the stock market.

Why would it stop when you feed it and propagate its vacuous Subject?

Mod FP funny, and if that moderation had happened sooner, then maybe the humorous opening FP would have been more productive. But I don't have another joke to add, so I'll fork (as is my tendency in most cases).

New Subject:

Not an actual case of cryocide, so what's the problem here?

Near as I can tell (without actually breaking down and reading everything) is that she died, was pronounced and certified as dead, and he didn't incinerate or bury her corpse, but chose to freeze her remains. Minor question about how long that process took, but not too interesting.

Now imagine that it was a case of cryocide. Imagine that she was still alive when she pushed a button to carefully freeze herself BEFORE she was actually dead. On the one hand, the cause of death is now a kind of suicide, but on the other hand, if the freezing is carefully done with the intention of minimizing the damage and the hope of being revived in the future, then we may be looking at an entirely fresh can of worms.

I actually imagine this as an opening for a series of SF stories called "Cyocide Crybabies" about waking up in worlds gone wrong. Any leads? Or even interest?

Not an unreasonable FP, but now you can reply to yourself to clarify what you mean. Perhaps under a more thoughtful and substantive Subject? I'm too happily retired to care about your apparent focus, and I don't see how to make any more jokes under the current conditions so thoroughly dominated by Poe's Law, so I'm switching to a practical topic:

The google is nagging me, even leaning on me, to buy some storage. But "Who steals my data, steals trash." I'm quite sure that my stored data is strongly dominated by worthless garbage. Will the google's AI help me throw away the trash?

I didn't think so.

However, I'm sure there is at least one large category of images that could be reduced to a few hundred bytes per image. This is actually the kind of task AI is good for, but "Don't be evil" has been completely redefined now. It's a Level 3 lie, but "evil" now means "anything that might impede or reduce the google's profits".

So I'll just start throwing away stuff at random. And feeling even more disgusted with the google and even more eager to go ANYWHERE else.

Wait a minute. I finally did think of a joke. Hilarious to remember my positive sentiments about the google of yore. So different from today's sentiments towards one of the truly great corporate cancers.

Good joke, but he didn't say they were real words or what kind of keyboard he was using.

But by voice I can probably input faster than I could ever type--and I made my living as a typist for a couple of stretches.

Is that related to the iPad thing?

See other reply.

Your grasp of economics is so deep.

So how would you like to buy a nice bridge? Only slightly used by a little old lady who crossed it to go to church on Sundays.

You remind me of a CFO I used to work with. Harvard MBA, so he must have been a genius. Can't understand how the company went bankrupt. I'm sure there was no causal link, but I had left long before that... I got too tired of taking care of problems that had been omitted from the business plan...

So far no mention of the Chinese elephant in the room? Also curious about the European situation. Or should I report on the increasingly bleak Japanese situation as regards electricity supplies?

One thing about renewable power like solar and wind is that you may have "free" excess capacity just because the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. For a lot of the AI training stuff, that can be scheduled when the power is available and thus lower the electricity demand from the data centers for AI training... You don't need to worry about storing the electricity if you have some lower-priority stuff scheduled to use it immediately.

Why funny? Because I think it would be funny if someone made a special version of the Tesla logo. Look close and you'd see it's actually a starving child with extended arms. One version could be a plastic logo cover for the hood ornament on Tesla cars.

I also considered the option of a little note to stick under the wiper of a parked Tesla: "Are you pro-life? If so, why do you drive a car linked with starving innocent children to death?"

Of course I'm just joking and I'd never actually do such a thing. Or maybe I'm not joking and I just believe that no insurance company would cover a Tesla unless the owner has a parking place with surveillance cameras? But I don't think you could pay me enough to support any Musk enterprise now. No joke.