Absolutely no incentive. Normally ransomware gangs (I've heard) strive to provide great customer service in order to maintain trust that they will decrypt future victim's payloads. But since this attack was carried out by AI the data was at the mercy of a stochastic parrot. The lesson learned for the attackers will probably be to ask the attack to execute a known script once it achieves a toehold instead of trusting the prompt to do so the work.

How about we nationalize all those nice new data centers and pay dividends to all taxpayers? Oh, is that not the sort of solution they had in mind? *Shrug*

Was it premature? I don't have a dog in this fight, but from the summary it sounds like he broke a clear rule, was given warnings about his behavior, and then eventually banned after persisting in that behavior.

Misinformation is a genocide engine. That was true before social media (remember Yugoslavia?), and it's true now (see Myanmar for a recent example).

The problem with the internet is that it greatly accelerates factionalization (via filter bubbles, foreign influence campaigns, and algorithms that optimize for outage). It's fertile ground for seeding doubts and conspiracy theories (5g, flat earth, "pandemic", etc). This is corrosive and disintegrative.

To invent civilization, humans had to create and improve countless "social technologies" including language, art, religion, finance, law, corporations, and various schemes for distributing power and curtailing selfishness. The internet (and now AI) are something new and wholly transformative... we need new social innovations to deal with the problems they create. We will have to try a lot of things (many which, sadly will backfire or be abused) and it will take a long time.

I distinguish "social media" from "forums" by content and design. A forum (like slashdot) discusses ideas/news/events, either for a particular subject (furries), a broad domain (news for nerds) or the world in general; it's also predominantly textual and permits multi-paragraph responses, almost always in a threaded format. Social media (like Facebook, Instagram, and linked in), by contrast, revolves around participant's identities and social graph ~ think vacation photos, profiles, real name policies, community groups, business page that should have been dedicated websites, etc. While forums might have personalities (well-known prolific posters), only social media has influencers.

Social media is also heavily visual. This they have in common with meme sites (like imgur and 9gag), but the latter lack the sustained cultivation of personal (and business) identities.

Judging from the name of his drone ships, he's clearly read some of Iain Bank's Culture series. It features a futuristic interstellar socialist civilization run by benevolent AI's who just happen to be very deadly spaceships.

  (I recommend Player of Games for an easy/fun read and Use of Weapons for deeper theme/characterization.)

Once again, America's economic interests and foreign relations have suffered because we elected an emotionally fragile boy-king who can only think of himself. What's it going to be next month?

Left or right... At this point I'd just be happy for some adult leadership in the room.

I've always been pro free speech, but social media has left me wondering... if a business model can be shown to inherently fracture societies, destabilize democracies, and fuel genocide, should it be allowed to exist? Maybe there's a different way to share cat photos with your grandma that doesn't require entrusting our civic discourse to algorithms that maximize for fear and outrage.

Nudity detection isn't exactly a new technology, and the results don't have to be perfect/infallible to passify lawmakers. Love it or hate it as public policy, but technically it's possible.

Your comment presupposes that those who coast will just get washed out and it will only affect them. Instead:

(1) As a result of AI, students who would have invested the effort and become solid developers will instead "coast" thru.

(2) Many of the coasters will still get their degree, enter the job market, and obtain developer positions.
They may even have an advantage over non-coasters because they will have had more time to devote to extracurriculars and internships.

NET RESULT: AI weakens the overall quality and quantity and good entry-level developers available for the field to hire.

This. Society doesn't need commercial location tracking firms (e.g., that track the general population). Ban them and require due privacy protections for digital products that use location data.

This guy gets it

And you also don't understand consciousness. None of us do. Maybe it's deterministic or maybe it's not. We feel like we have free will, but so what? Dawkins feels he's talking to a conscious being because the faux-social interaction triggers neutral circuitry for interacting with others. Agency over-attribution ain't exactly rare: most humans believe in god despite not interacting with him in person.

Dawkins is most likely wrong, but without a fundamental understanding of what consciousness is, I don't know how you outrule the possibility.

Climate change *denial* is the tool of the oligarchs... if you're a rich old man it's better to ignore the problem so your taxes stay low and your portfolio increases in value faster. Actually fighting it means having to invest in infrastructure and new technologies which has the unfortunate effect of creating jobs and distributing wealth more broadly.

Given that AI will kill us all if it gets too smart, this seems like a good first step towards regulation. Really, a much more comprehensive worldwide response from governments is needed to prevent an intelligence from overrunning humanity.