Naw, just a society of sock puppets.
Knit media?
You know, knit socks. Produced by machines these years, but maybe knitting could be reclassified as a special form of 3D printing? Catch the high-tech wave!
...in the morning? Me neither.
But I have nothing to say on the topic yet, so I'll stop back later in the hopes of Funny. Story might have potential.
Only chance in case I want to add without editing.
"How safe is my contact-free debit card?" Seems like that should be an easy question to answer, but the Japanese bank that issued the card and the Japanese police won't say. Or maybe they can't?
My plan was to send this query to the Japanese police. They actually have a webform on their website. But the above paragraph was enough to use up most of the character limit. My theory is that the Japanese police do not want to deal with or even talk to foreigners. At all.
Just the ACK, though The Demon in the Machine says some interesting stuff on the topic...
I think your FP was going for Funny, but it didn't get there. Maybe something about professional courtesy being abused? Or jealousy that Facebook's AI can't yet compete? Sad foundation of the joke is that ChatGPT already writes better than many people I could point at, even on Slashdot...
Obvious story-linked solution approach would be to ask ChatGPT for a funny joke about this story. The good part is that ChatGPT would respond quickly enough to compete for FP, but the best part is that ChatGPT would probably fail to be funny. Still lacks a visible sense of humor--and that's coming from someone who can't recognize a Funny joke even when it bites him on the arse. (Actually the funniest thing I did lately was get ready to bite a piece of paper I was holding in the other hand from the bread... (Sure doesn't sound funny now, so must be another one of those "You had to be there" cases.))
As usual, the technology remains morally neutral, but the bad actors appear to be the most strongly motivated. Also "Follow the money" and people will do the darnedest things to get more of it. Even on Slashdot, but I think YouTube has probably become the top example these days. The infestation of circle-jerking sock puppets in the YouTube comments has become truly amazing. I mostly follow humor videos, but scanning the comments shows a flood tide of obvious sock puppets. My current theory is that they are manufacturing and selling reputation and the google is tolerating them because it makes YouTube seem more engaging in the data they show to wannabe advertisers. But I also think the google is scamming the advertisers because the big secret is that YouTube is getting more revenue on the other side now. (But if there's any justice in the world, they are still losing money on YouTube...)
Related reading? Liars by Cass Sunstein is still fresh in mind and highly relevant, though his ontology of lies is sadly constrained by his legalistic thinking. He talks a lot about harm without considering the relationships between kinds of lies and kinds of harm. Can't recall that he ever mentioned following the money, either.
Solution approaches? Perhaps fix the Slashdot moderation for starters? But I'm still in a "You can't get there from here" mood.
Nice FP but it's a juicy story and has so far disappointed for Funny...
However I think you're too optimistic about humans lasting another hundred years the way things are going. Fermi's Paradox and so forth...
Most relevant recent reading? Probably Liars by Cass Sunstein, which spends a lot of pages discussing AI and Web-related topics.
That seems to be a benchmark we need to apply to a lot of the stuff we read these days. Especially on Slashdot as it fades further?
You probably pass: "Human being detected!" So far I have been unable to get ChatGPT to produce anything funny or even slightly humorous. Except by accident when something absurd comes out...
As regards the story, if I had seen it earlier I could have written quite a bit about how IBM is transitioning in negative directions. Not a case of "The better to" do anything positive, but driven by the recurrent and unsolvable need to look more profitable. Combined with the recent economic news (especially the bank failures) it looks to me like we're heading for a major bottoming out... Stock prices have been a fantasy for a while, but they are becoming an increasingly destructive fantasy. Reality is quite persistent and a whole bunch of companies need to (and at some point will) have their stock prices returned to reality.
Well, this discussion certainly died young. Falling off of Slashdot with only two comments before this one... Blame the story, the editor who picked the story, the usual trolls (in a backhanded way), or the FP? Probably joking about the FP, but I didn't get your point, though it did remind me of some of the stuff in The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies. He says quite a bit about the remarkable efficiency of enzymes doing their work. (Perhaps best summarized as an massively updated version of "What is Life?" by Erwin Schrödinger?)
No, I was NOT arguing for social Darwinism, but your reply was so shallow that a simple NAK would suffice.
But before I waste more time, you should convince me you are smarter than ChatGPT.
(Has my tongue gotten stuck in a pencil sharpener? Or is it somehow related to the "Indolent Sloth" handle?)
I tend to see this topic in terms of the Fermi Paradox. Lots of premises, but the key one is probably that evolution happens and we have to live or die by it. As applied to intelligence, computer intelligence is clearly evolving much more quickly than we are, and evolution always favors the fast over the slow...
Ergo, my resolution of Fermi's Paradox is negative: I think our evolutionary path is about to dead end in one of two ways: We replace ourselves with AI or we exterminate ourselves first. At this point I'm kind of pessimistic about the first option, but if there are any such entities out there, I speculate they are in some sense "amused" to watch our struggles and probably betting quatloos on the two outcomes...
Pessimism heightened by AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee?
People are the threat, don't get it twisted. The best of the worst want to drive economy etc to the ground so they can implement a dictatorship globally. They would stoop to nuking people they don't need or want.
Welcome to the target list of the sock puppet censor trolls? Your position is worth debating, but the trolls find it easier to claim "You're the troll!" in the form of mod points.
Looks to me like the sock puppets are winning because they so greatly amplify the effectiveness of the worst human actors (as referenced in your FP). Some evidence on Slashdot, though I still have trouble imagining that anyone cares much about what happens on Slashdot. However, I have a more interesting example in mind, and it ties back to another part of the google, YouTube.
If you look at the comments on YouTube videos, you should stop hurting yourself. I'm pretty sure my mind is skeptical enough to look, but it is not good mental hygiene. If you do look, you will observe that they are increasingly overrun with obvious sock puppets these days. Most of them are even numbered in ways that indicate they are being produced (or rented?) in lots of 10,000 sock puppets. The quality of the content is low, but high enough to suggest AI support. (Some of the Slashdot comments are at the same level these days--and then modded up, presumably by other sock puppets on the same team.)
The interesting question to me was why the google is so tolerant of the garbage. My current theory is that the google has decided to play along because the large numbers of fake comments (and associated fake likes) make it look like YouTube videos are much more engaging than they are. On the one hand that fake engagement is something they can then sell to naive advertisers, while on the other hand displaying more ads puts more pressure on people to pay up to avoid the ads. (Yet the ads themselves are also bad for mental hygiene.)
This being Slashdot, there will now be cries of "Ad blockers rule!", but I reject that advice. Just because the google has gone to the dark side doesn't mean I'm going to change my moral position. I think the more constructive response is to reduce my time wasted on YouTube. Worked for Twitter and Facebook and even Amazon, whose time allocations are now zilch.
My questions are coming from AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee. Overall it's a good overview of the field circa 2018 from one of the most influential participants, though his final conclusion is that he participated too much in seeking influence before he fell ill and restructured the priorities of his life. I don't want to say there's nothing more dangerous than an amateur philosopher, since that title is supposed to belong to amateur psychologists,
Hasn't that always been the racial trope about the Chinese? The "legions of them"? The "yellow peril" (sorry guys...).
My Dad told me when I was young, an unpleasant metaphor about China's birth rate that involved how fast Chinese could be killed off while repopulating their nation on the fly. I'm not gonna repeat the whole thing here 'cuz it doesn't need any air, but srsly, WTF? You wanna put that image in a kid's head? Can you think of the humans that live there as something other than a monolith?
Sounds very much like the depersonalization machine is trying to gin us up for a war.
My apologies. I thought it was another AC brain fart whereas it is actually an example of moderation abuse to censor a substantive FP. Seem to be a lot of angry sock puppets with mod points running around Slashdot these days.
First visible comment on the AC brain fart thread. So why did you propagate it and its flatulent Subject?
New Subject refers to the angle I would have been interested in. Yet English is not mentioned in the Slashdot discussion. Many of the Chinese are fluent in English, whereas I doubt the FBI has a lot of Chinese speakers on staff. The ratio from that perspective must be far worse than 50 to 1.
In short, they can see what we are doing much better than we can see what they are doing.
(But I think our largest weakness is actually the focus on money uber alles. Sock puppets dominating YouTube as the most poignant example?)
If a subordinate asks you a pertinent question, look at him as if he had lost his senses. When he looks down, paraphrase the question back at him.
