The winning 2016 candidate lost the popular vote.

... to blame store employees instead of technology or the management decision to knowingly deploy a flawed technology.

You'll start to see such "accountability sinks" a lot whenever a company needs to weasle out of legal and PR situations caused by their AI deployments.

Space is cheap compared to war and corruption.

He's long-winded, ideological, and sort of off-topic, but he's not necessarily wrong.

Also, the very concept of remote proctoring is a foolish dream. The kids are going to outsmart you... some of them anyways, and then they'll tell their friends how they did it.

No real worry about that: the usual crowd is greasing palms and heavily funding opposition to candidates who oppose AI or want to regulate it.

I think what's unsettling is that AIs are initiating an arms race: AI attack was analyzed (and probably patched) via AI.

Evolutionary pressure: long term (few years?), agents at various places will evolve a kind-of immune system solely to defend against other agents from taking advantage of them... Humans will just be observers by that point, powerless to even understand what's going on.

It (might) make sense for him because they will (probably) treat him very well, despite being more authoritarian (and evil) in general. This also makes sense if he prioritizes career over politics.

...now AI is one of the most destructive

The profit motive is making it non-economical to do anything other than create mediocre code with LLMs. Exceptional generation defining leaps in tech (like DOOM and Quake) simply won't happen if everyone is just generating their way to the next paycheck.

Think about it, could AI have come up with Fast inverse square root... I'm sure it could have with enough prompting and someone who knew what they were looking for, feeding it prompts detailed enough that they contained the answer.... but on its own, there's no way AI would've coded it from scratch into a game engine.

I recently had to deal with some xray images on CDs, and discovered to my surprise that I didn't have a reader... I tossed away all CDs like a decade ago, and old hardware just got replaced, all without drives. Nothing came with cd-rom drives in at least a decade, no? So genuine question, how many folks still have a cd-rom drive to be able to read those CDs?

(I ended up buying a cheap drive just to read those xray images... but haven't used it for anything since).

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.