They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.
The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.
If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.
I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.
But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.
Really, you don't see any difference between Elon Musk and, say, John Stankey? Is John Stankey actively transforming the US into an autocratic fascist-adjacent state?
Would you buy from a company called Plantations Inc which proudly advertises that all of its products are made by daily-whipped slaves? Are there no limits to how self-focused you are in your consumption?
It's one thing to say "this particular issue isn't mine, so I'm only going to think amount myself". It's an entirely different issue to have no moral bounds.
This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.
What are you talking about? EV sales are booming, in no small part thanks to Trumps war with Iran.
My EV is an appreciating asset at the moment because used prices are rising.
Those are often the first things to be electrified, because the operators are closer to rational actors who see the immediate savings. Of course the real world gets in the way, but for example about half the busses here are electric because one of the companies replaced them all as part of a fleet upgrade a couple of years ago. They are much nicer too.
Well, that's because your local co-op FTTH deployment is funded by heavy government subsidies.
FTTH is outrageously expensive.
It's great when you can get it, but the money is real.
If FTTP were outrageously expensive small providers all over the world would not be able to deploy it. Operational cost savings pay for themselves within a few years and ultimately if you want to offer competitive service you have no choice in the matter.
Comcast is a perfect example of an incumbent sitting on its ass while a rinky dink ISPs nobody has even heard of does a phased deployment throughout town permanently eroding their customer base.
Yeah, it's gonna be literally impossible to see you walking around in that thing emitting visible light in all directions.
If the visible light emitted is exactly the same intensity, color, and pattern as the background behing you, yes, you'd be very nearly invisible.
Only from one direction, though (unless the background is nearly featureless).
An upstart company would make a "dumb TV"
There are dumb TVs still being made.
That you don't even know that shows you are not a serious customer for such a product.
I also won't buy any audio or video gear that requires a network connection
You can just click "Skip" when it asks you to connect to the Internet.
You can stop it, but most people can't or won't.
They don't need to block 100% of debloating.
99.9% is good enough.
The only ads I see are for video content like new movies or TV shows, and I don't mind those.
PG&E in California incentivizes me to reduce my power consumption from 2 to 7 pm, and gives me cheap off-peak electricity from 2 to 4 am, when I charge my EV.
I've been on this program for 11 years. It works well for me.
well, it is true (afaik), except it's stale 2 weeks old recycled news. the overall reaction here is both depressing and hilarious, as was to be expected, but much more so than usual. maybe a side effect of the increasing desperation in europe and the anticipation of the mid-terms in the us, "democrats" seem to be by far the most rabid rusophobes.
I've always found myself fascinated by the phenomenon of aggressors playing victim. Yes we are waging bloody wars of conquest, raze entire cities to the ground, massacre civilians and abduct children..... but
Of course, Norway isn't some third world country.
Michaux has been widely discredited. His 2021 report, for example, listed 65.4% of energy as wasted. That's probably true, most fossil fuel powered systems produce massive amounts of waste heat. But he still seems to think that we need to produce that much if we switch to electricity, which is obviously not the case.
Some of it is just misrepresentation. He uses Germany as an example, claiming they need 12 weeks of energy storage. The estimate he cites, which was already outlandish, actually says 24 days, and that's ridiculous. In the real world, there is no need for a whole country UPS because with enough renewables you only ever see hours of deficit, which can be covered with gas (only because it's cheaper to do that and offset it than to go 100% renewables/storage).
He also ignores all the HVDC lines that were being built at the time, and hasn't updated for all the once built since or announced since, so his estimate for the battery storage requirement is at least an order of magnitude off. He also bases his mineral estimates on old chemistry that was poor even when he wrote it, let alone today, and assumes it all has to be lithium ion battery storage.
He does the same thing with copper. Bases it off old technology, ignores aluminium as a conductor, ignores recycling, and vastly over-estimates the requirement.
The whole thing is full of obvious holes. Reality is that most countries can get to over 95% renewables + storage, and then some other sources for the remaining few percent which can have carbon capture and offsetting to reach net zero. The result is cheaper energy and a small chance we might not completely bugger up the planet.
Be sociable. Speak to the person next to you in the unemployment line tomorrow.
