Because there is a lot of negativity about China and Chinese brands.

In the UK you can buy an MG, and they are good, solid, well made cars, at very reasonable prices. MG is a very old British car brand, and stands for Morris Garages. Their cars were crap and they went bust decades ago because they couldn't compete with European and Japanese manufacturers.

Now they are a SAIC (Shanghai Automotive) brand. SAIC sells commercial vehicles under its own name here too, because commercial buyers are only interested in the numbers and no all the nonsense about Chinese products that consumers pick up on.

It works both ways. Berghaus is British, not German. Haggen Dazs is American, not Danish. Matsui is British, not Japanese, as is Superdry (all the Japanese writing on their clothes is nonsense).

But if you don't connect that remote sensor or monitoring station to the internet, they have to send someone to go read it. That costs money, so of course they demand it is on the internet. The marketing department needs that feature because all the competitors have it and the customers put it as a hard requirement in their spec.

These things are never driven by engineering.

...it acts increasingly drunk over time until it pukes all over your open apps and files one random day, either forcing you to reboot or self-rebooting via crash?

...even more monopolish. If there isn't such a word, there should be, as it keeps happening.

and 6 of those 7 are probably bots.

The extreme left has gone way beyond UBI and Universal Healthcare. They are now advocating outright Communism, praising Chairman Mao, etc.

All 7 of them.

You can keep trying to beat the machine but you're not going to in the end.

They're going to keep trying this and they're going to gradually improve it to the point where they can automate some tasks and where they can drastically improve performance. Also AI is going to take people who normally could not compete with you for jobs and provide them with a crutch that lets them compete. That will drastically increase the number of people you have to compete with in the job market.

This is what's driving me nuts about America we completely lack any sense of nuance or complexity. Either the AI job apocalypse takes all of our jobs and we are all broke and homeless or it's nothing to worry about carry on.

Instead what is likely to happen is that we're going to hit a tipping point where automation hollows out the middle class and we don't have enough people with disposable income to drive a capitalist economy causing a collapse into tax base and a general spiral into abject poverty for 95% of the population.

Long-term if the technology works out for the Epstein class they will replace everyone except a handful of engineers and a handful of thugs to keep the engineers in line. There's a well understood process for doing that used by guys like Vladimir Putin and Kim jong-un. It's a more advanced version of feudalism. What the cool kids called techno feudalism.

But short-term we already have a major crisis on our hands. The only people with significant disposable income in the US economy are the baby boomers and they are blowing through all that money on our healthcare system and just living their retirements and making it to 80 or 90 years old because of various drug cocktails. Current estimates are that only about 30% of the wealth held by the baby boomers will be passed on and most of that will go to a handful of individuals this proportionately.

So right off the bat in about 5 or 10 years we are not going to have the disposable income needed to keep our economy functional without major systemic changes we are not willing to do. Basically some form of socialism and wealth redistribution.

Instead it seems we're going to pretend they'll be magic future jobs that nobody can describe but somehow save us. But I don't see how we get there when virtually all of the energy on new tech in our society is being spent automating jobs away not creating new things. Literally trillions of dollars are being spent to free the Epstein class from the shackles of capitalism and having to sell their products to us and employ us.

It's not a doomsday scenario it's not cool like that. It's a gradual wearing down and breaking down of the social order and a return to the worst kind of societies where everything is built around glorifying and exalting a handful of kings and queens.

Depends if they were prevented from getting up, or not told by the company to get up periodically. Most will include that as part of induction.

They also need to supply a suitable chair, and reasonably ergonomic workspace.

So they need some lithium hydride in there too apparently.

Obviously weight is an issue but so is your staff getting cancer.

In case he does, I hope Bill Gates is learning to laugh at the irony my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Or in other words, as people were saying even in the 1960s:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
      "To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer."

How can we mitigate that risk? Like President John F. Kennedy quipped (echoed by Joel Goodman of the Humor Project):
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
        "There are three things which are real:
        God, human folly, and laughter.
        The first two are beyond our comprehension.
        So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)

Or, as I explain in more detail:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and economic] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Here is someone involved in AI who gets that our direction out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction and level of compassion going into it:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it. Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026."

I'm glad to see more AI and technology leaders starting to get that. Another example:
https://www.schmidtsciences.or...
        ""As AI systems advance, we face the risk that they will act in ways that contradict human values and interests--but this risk is not inevitable," said Eric Schmidt. "With efforts like the AI Safety Science program, we can help build a future in which AI benefits us all while maintaining safeguards that protect us from harm."
        The cohort of researchers--including "godfather of AI" Yoshua Bengio at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, OpenAI board member Zico Kolter at Carnegie Mellon University, and "AI Snake Oil" author Arvind Narayanan at Princeton University--will focus their work on research that addresses the critical safety challenges that AI faces."

Ultimately though, guard rails can come off or be jumped -- so we really need AI with a sense of humor -- especially for irony. :-)

--------

And we also need AI developers and funders who root their work more in compassion as a guiding force more than competition.

Something I wrote to Ray Kuzweil on that back in 2000 (put up by someone else I sent a copy to):
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt."

And also in 2001:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
          "Beware that people (usually not well versed in E&E [Ecology & Evolution]) cite ecology and evolution all the time to support a belief, but that does not make it a scientifically valid thing to do. For example, it is common to cite competition as a given in nature, but Lewis Thomas in "Lives of a Cell" points out that most successful organisms participate in effectively collaborative efforts -- like the symbiosis between mitochondria and eukaryotic cells. Likewise, the fact that something is true in most species does not mean that humans (given intelligence and culture) should behave that way -- because if E&E teaches anything, it is that there is a lot of diversity out there."

And in 2007:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "Technologies designed to amplify and extend the scope of corporate greed likely just will not have the same positive basis as ones built out of joy and humor and love. If you ever watch the British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, greed seems much more likely to design "Queeg" than "Holly". Langdon Winner writes about related issues at length in his classic _Autonomous Technology_.
      In short, I feel it likely you are clinging to outdated disprove assumptions about motivation and creativity and economics. And I speculate that the reason is in part ironically from your past success. Those assumptions may be holding you back, and holding on to them may indeed help bring about a very negative side of the singularity you want to avoid."

Also on that theme: https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...
        "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers.
        Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of "human nature." It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.
        No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."

I did, no copies in the UK apparently.

So we've spent the last 40 some odd years automating everything we can get our hands on. We didn't automate meat cutters and burger flippers though. There's some people playing around with that but it's mostly for advanced robotics research. We focused on high paying jobs because of course we did.

So the guy doing mining making 100K a year got his job automated away and now he can go work at Walmart selling cheap crap made with the stuff pulled out of the mine.

The problem is that you're replacing 100K worth of income and economic activity with 30k.

This is why we have consistently seen the labor participation rate drop and this is why we keep having to cook the numbers on unemployment. This is why we have to pretend driving Uber is a full-time job and one the people are choosing instead of turning two out of desperation.

There's a concept called functional unemployment which is when you technically have a job but you can't support yourself on that job. I don't mean you can't support yourself well I mean you're working homeless or you are mooching off of family if you aren't somehow homeless. That's about 20% of our population.

Go to Google and search for the phrase "70% middle class job automation". You will find a study about that and about how automation has devastated the American middle class.

And here's the thing it didn't have to, but it did. That's a concept I think people have a hard time with especially people who dabble in progressive ideas or at least futurism. The idea of that well it didn't have to happen so it couldn't have happened. We could have created an economy where the benefits of that automation boom made it to everybody.. but we didn't. And we're not going to because every time you suggest doing that a bunch of old farts screams socialism in your ears.

The way it works in Europe is that the employer has a legal responsibility to identify things that can harm employees, and take reasonable steps to mitigate them. The three things identified in the lawsuit - passive smoking, night shifts, and cosmic radiation - have all been known to cause cancer for a very long time.

They stopped the smoking in 2000. The night shifts continued, and they didn't install any radiation shielding in the aircraft. They also knew that going over the poles increased the dose their staff were getting, and didn't make much effort to at least rotate them onto different flights.

You have to understand that most of the people using these systems are not highly trained, and if you make them secure they will just blame you for them not doing their jobs and their boss will start shouting at you. It's "this needs fixing NOW, we are losing money!" vs "you might get hacked in future".

Once when I suggested we should secure a system the guy told me that we were not an important enough target to get hacked and so couldn't justify the expense.

The only solution is to make security a legal requirement and enforce it with regular inspections and heft fines.

You can just tell the AI not to do that. I gave Gemini standing orders not to flatter me so much, and not sugar coat things. It works well.