On our timeline, the first true AGI will arrive simultaneously with the first Genuine People Personality; surprisingly similar to the Stack Exchange archetype, it will generally claim that it's using the Socratic Method to help you ask better questions while strongly suggesting that you're an idiot.

(With full apologies to those of use who have done good things for SE.)

The article has a strange take on the concept, but technically the description appears to be accurate. We don't need a surveillance state, and people can see you in public.

Okay. I don't know what to tell you man. I'm bummed that I misread the room and I'm bummed that my comment came off as partisan evangelism. If I had a point to make I guess I'd debate you, but that's not what I was going for at all. I'll piss off now.

I do great on friends irl. Sorry if you didn't like that train of thought, though I'm not sure how we got to a place where looking at what's worked historically became a partisan thing.

... and when you realize just how many of your friends and family have repeatedly ended up in the same boat, learn from history and do what works: labor movement. Because "laid off" does not mean you were too lazy. It means they already took everything they could get, and now they want you to shut up and go away.

Are the UK politicians subject to the same incentives as here in the US? Sometimes it looks like they're willing to pass laws that go against what the US tech companies want. I'm not really up to speed on UK politics but I can imagine a country deciding that foreign game companies ripping off local citizens should be made to pay heavy fines with very few negative consequences locally. Would be interested to know what their political reality is.

Bet at least a third are actively looking for pics when they're home alone.

Not claiming inside knowledge, it's just served me well to figure anyone who spends too much time obsessing over other people's underpants probably has a thing for whatever's going on in there.

Yes, you've been saying that. Your claim the entire time has been:

1. 1. Consumers burn hydrocarbons.
2. 2. Therefore consumers should be held accountable for climate change, and oil companies should not.

One more time for the lulz? Okay, here is a simplified variation of the original so you can try again:

1. 1. In numerous other contexts, from heroin dealers to construction workers to doctors, we hold people who sell products and services accountable for both their products and business practices.
2. 2. Oil companies pursued this business model, knowing the consequences.
3. 3. By definition, it would be consistent to hold oil companies accountable, just like we do in many other contexts, from the criminal to the professional.

To be clear, and as I originally said - I don't actually care whether you accept my take. I just wondered why did you decide that protecting the oil companies is the hill to die on? Why not use your argument to claim "customers buy heroin, therefore heroin dealers shouldn't go to jail when someone dies of an overdose," or "many heart failures are caused by bad diet, therefor doctors shouldn't have to buy malpractice insurance when they do heart surgery?" I'm not saying you should make those claims. Just that I was sort of curious as to why oil companies are the exception to the norm you personally want to argue for. What's up with that?

Sorry, "counterfactual nonsense?" ... and you didn't even think to run a quick internet search for "Exxon climate denial?" If you were trying to prove that you can't be swayed by basic facts or logic, that'd do it.

The oil companies have a well documented, easily researched, history altering track record of funding climate denial, hijacking political processes, and engaging in full on human rights abuses in countries where they could get away with it dating back, at minimum, to the 1970s. It takes all of 3 seconds to find it detailed anywhere from Wikipedia to scientific journals to records of failed climate treaties and archives of senate hearings.

If all you had said was "drug dealers don't exist without drug buyers," I could have just concluded that you and I have slightly different preferences about how to approach solving a problem, but saying "counterfactual nonsense" without even looking up the topic? How is anyone supposed to take that seriously?

I think that folks dismissing the "made by humans" thing are about half wrong. As a label to generate fake demand - sure, it's dumb... But as a long term reality - here's my question: no matter what the specific products are and how we rank the "quality," doesn't the AI generated stuff just fit the same economic niche as a vending machine?

I'd be willing to bet that if you offered a 12th century (or whatever) king the choice between a candy bar and a really good steak, he'd go for the candy bar and call it mana from the gods... but no freaking way are any of us dropping $40 for a Snickers. The steak is not more valuable because it has a "made by humans" label on it, but in real life, it is more valuable because someone had to do something real to make it taste good.

Nobody who has to do real, actual work to earn their money is going to willingly give up a significant portion of their earnings for something spat out by a robot. You trade your real work for other peoples real work, and anything in the vending machine is junk food, no matter how amazing it would seem to people who lived before that particular kind of vending machine became common.

I don't think this means artists are going to be able to save themselves by saying "made by humans," but I don't blame them for being pissed that folks are snatching up their work and shoving into complicated vending machines. I do think that anyone trying to revolutionize their business with AI and lay everyone off had better plan for a day when their product is worth about the same as a warm coke.

Yes, we all take part in using the energy produced by oil companies. My observation already addressed that fact, and pointed out that, from the lens of accountability, there are any number of other risks and decisions that we collectively take, and yet we maintain standards of accountability. You haven't responded to the concept of accountability - you've just rehashed your original claim without handling it's underlying inconsistency at all.

This does answer the question I posed, specifically are you capable of adjusting to, or at least acknowledging, different ways of looking at the underlying problem? The answer you have given is "no."

For anyone else who might be, I can address the fact that we do, in fact, participate in creating the problem when we purchase the oil companies products: The difference is this - oil companies have spent decades (arguably generations, at this point) funding climate denial and political obstruction to the advance of alternatives. They haven't just been passively doing what people asked of them; they've devoted immense effort and resources undermining democracy and the possibilities of future technology at our expense. From the lens of accountability, there is a difference between aggressively preventing people from solving a problem and merely being stuck with a problem that you actually can't solve on your own. They are accountable at a different level because they have deliberately participated at a different level.

You're looking at this through the lens of a trade-off: whenever we make technological progress, we take risks. Your argument seems to be that as a society, we accepted the risks of climate change when we demanded cheap energy, and allowing individuals who are hurt to sue the oil companies would ultimately force them to close, and put us, figuratively speaking, back in the stone age.

You also doubt the motives of the folks making this lawsuit.

I wonder if you really believe that, and also whether you're the kind of person who can change their mind when presented with a different approach? Because - if you were the billionaire child of some an oil baron somewhere, I would understand why you are making this argument... barring that I'm not sure why you would want to do so.

For comparison sake - I drive a car regularly. If I were to accidentally kill someone while driving - even if it were truly just a bad luck mistake, and even in a world where bad luck car accidents are statistically inevitable, I would be held accountable. Financially.

Suppose I said: "Accidental death is an inevitable risk of driving. Therefore, anyone who wants compensation for a lost loved one is just greedy, and I shouldn't be held accountable for killing the accidental pedestrian because that's just the risk society took when it decided to have cars." If I really believed that, would you conclude that I should be allowed to drive anything bigger than a tricycle?

We expect accountability from people who prepare food, build skyscrapers, and perform heart surgery. That's not about greed. That's necessary component of a functioning society. It also has not meant giving up on food, skyscrapers, or medicine. Instead, the people who engage in those activities have to take responsibility for the risks that come with their decisions.

So on the one hand - I get that there is a trade off between advancing our society and risking lives. But I'm less clear on why you would want those trade offs to be made without accountability by the people making them; and even more unclear on why, of all the people you could decide should be exempted from the normal rules of accountability, you'd settle on billionaires from the oil industry.

We don't need automation to eliminate real work. We don't need UBI to keep real workers afloat. We just need to get rid of billionaires so that the people who actually do real work have something to show for it.

Nice touch. Given the way things are going, I'd be interested to see a F/OSS inspired attempt to build a practical replacement for the broken & corrupt parts of the US government. I don't know how it would work. It would take a lot of dedicated and intelligent people working together effectively, even knowing how badly the odds are stacked. But sitting around hoping that someone else will get it done probably won't end well.

Yeah, I remember that stuff with Microsoft... ! At the time it bugged me more for the security implications than the anti-trust stuff, though I wasn't shy about generally preferring the Linux model back then either.

My gut reaction is the same here - if you've got a system level API that's too dangerous to expose to application developers at large, it seems like the last thing you should be doing is opening it to a web browser, even if it's your own developers working on the browser.

My secondary reaction is that, if you take it as given that the EU has decided Apple is not allowed to have secret APIs they use to make their user-space apps more competitive, then the engineering solution might be to simply wall off those APIs from user-space altogether, rather that risk whatever security problems they are worried about. But again, I'm not a systems level programmer so I'm open to new information here.

Not a systems level programmer, but I've done some app dev; if I'm missing something and a sys programmer wants to clear it up, I'll be glad to know about it.

Typically if I were building an app, there would be a set of core functions that create the underlying data model and necessary rules for the app to work. Then there would be an API layer for "user stories" that defines inputs and outputs for each specific activity that a user would be allowed to execute, and and on the other side of that would be the actual UI. If I found application modeling or rules defined in the UI, or UI stuff in the core, I'd treat it as a bug.

I'm under the impression that the same general idea is supposed apply to the difference between system-level applications and user-space apps. There's bunch of stuff that tho OS needs to be able to do that you definitely do not want apps to be able to access directly. Is that wrong?

Given that the EU is probably trying to ensure a competitive playing field, which they presumably have the right to do in their own country, wouldn't the solution be that Apple's user-space applications should be limited to using the same user space API as every other user-space app? Wouldn't that actually be good practice for Apple's own security goals as well?