That's insufficient to solve the problem. It's not incompetence, or malfeasance, or reliance on AI. It's incompetence, malfeasance and reliance on AI.

We need to do a much better job of understanding and dealing with the fact that those factors are socially drawn together, metaphorically, like magnets within the context of default human behavior. We won't get anywhere debating which magnet to blame. We need to actually take the magnetism itself into account, and solve for it.

> whereas normally you'd have to wait for the harm to happen to sue

False. You can file a suit for any reason at any time. You do not have to wait until any harm is done. This does not, of course, mean the judge has to accept your filing.

But in this case, the 'harm' is that they are slowing down development/improvement of a product you are paying for. If you buy into a service on the promise or reasonable expectation that the vendor of that service will continue to improve it, and then they declare that they will drag their feet, that's a type of harm because you're not getting what you reasonably expected to be getting for your money.

Ultimately it's up to the judge to decide if there's enough meat on that bone to proceed to the next phase, but it's enough to get the paperwork started.
=Smidge=

So stalking is constitutional, then?

'cause it's not just "recording in public" it's full tracking and profiling. Who you are, where you are, when you're there. A full record of your daily activities from the moment you walk out your front door to the moment you get home again.

If the government was doing this directly in the same manner as these corporations do (e.g. without a warrant) it would 100% be a violation of your constitutional rights. The fact that the government does it by proxy, letting a private corporation do all the dirty work for them, really does not change the fundamental complaint here.

=Smidge=

Ooh. The heck with debate - what have you learned?

I partly agree. I do worry that most of people aren't recognizing a critical detail about the scope of evolutionary processes.

If a person dies of a heroin overdose, two things are true:

1. 1. They made an unfortunate decision to take heroin, that resulted in their own death.
2. 2. They lost an evolutionary battle with a syringe.

The second statement is, socially, a weird way to describe it. It is also accurate with regard to the scope that evolution actually covers in the universe.

We could probably get by just fine not thinking about syringes as an evolutionary competitor that occasionally kill some of us: we got through most of the industrial era without noticing that evolution does not distinguish between self-replicating organisms and other phenomenon like bicycles or languages. But I doubt we'll be able to continue much longer if we can't even recognize that our evolutionary competitors are not just animals or germs, and the playing field is not just the resources themselves.

Human minds, decision making processes, social structures, all of that are part of the environment, and literally every pattern in the universe that repeats is in on the evolutionary struggle. AI isn't just agents on computers. It's also the entire phenomenon, including the part where a human brain decides whether to devote energy toward building what the AI "wants" or what we actually need.

If we die out because we get so caught up building data centers that we don't handle other potential risks to our survival, most people will probably say "that wasn't AI, that was us making stupid decisions." But the only relevant fact at the evolutionary scale will be that, just like a heroin addict chasing a syringe, we will have failed to notice that our addiction is a survival strategy for a competitor perfectly adapted to avoid us even noticing that it is a threat.

"No true scotsman?" Okay.

The actual underlying observation, unadressed, is that evolutionary processes don't care about human interpretations about what counts as alive or intelligent or any of that. Richard Dawkins popularized that observation when he coined the term "meme," and while I'm aware that you'll be tempted to call that an appeal to authority, doing so doesn't address the phenomenon itself. As a phenomonon in the universe, AI is evolving and competing for resources. Human minds and social structures are two aspects of its ecosystem. Saying "but that's not AI, that's us making bad decisions" does not change the outcome, but it does leave you blind to the mechanisms by which evolving phenomenon can pose a threat.

I keep seeing arguments that the "AI Will Kill Us All" argument is a bunch of doomsaying by people who overestimate the potential intelligence of these systems. My own intuition leads me to argue that AI does not have to become self aware or autonomous. It just has to be sufficiently adaptable to make us both dependent and stupid. Today my confirmation bias feels vindicated.

Ugh. C'mon.

All it has to do is be sufficiently adaptable and profitable to convince us that we'd rather keep building data centers than care about whether everyone has enough water and energy. It does not have to become a self-aware superweapon. It just needs to be a mind-virus that causes us to make stupid decisions at scale.

It looks like they are glossing over the actors' concern that producers will use them as stars in movies where they did not actually perform. Even if AI can't slop a convincing movie from scratch today, given the way greed works, we could take it as a given that producers will basically be looking for ways to use famous people's faces without having to pay them by any means they can get away with from now on out.

This is actor worship, the new cult that appeared in the 1950s originated intentionally from Hollywood.

Normal human societies correctly identify that people who lie about everything, including everything about themselves for money are practicing a type of prostitution, and treat and have treated actors accordingly throughout human history.

In case of books, middlemen were horrifically abundant. Publisher, editor, official state censor/today's sensitivity reader.

Direct self publishing removed most of those, and now published, edited and officially state censored/sensitivity read "best sellers" sell five digit copies on a good release.

Meanwhile there are more book reading happening than ever, mainly on the back on direct self publishing which bypasses all of those.

Actors fundamentally are just middle men between the story teller and the audience. Generative video and audio AI like many IT developments is removing middle men from the relationship.

There are methods to add noise patterns to audio that are imperceptible to humans but cause AI to go apeshit, such as misidentifying rock music as classical or transcribing speech as something completely different from what is said.

I wonder what the practicalities might be to deploy this form of attack in an area around you when having a conversation you with to keep private. Probably would not be inaudible when played through a speaker (unlike data implanted in audio recordings) but maybe masked? Listen to some music on your phone's loudspeaker at a modest volume and broadcast invisible noise that fills any eavesdropping AI's buffer with junk or even malicious payloads.
=Smidge=

Your answer is complete and accurate. Of note: the level of panic tends to increase when they encounter people with charisma and competence.

So? Evolution doesn't care about any of those details, and it's already competing with us for land, water, and energy.