You've got questions, we've got cellphones.

In a real sense, the back end recognition that Flock does is exactly stalking on a massive scale.

It's not a matter of not being seen or even not being photographed every now and then. That level of privacy is not available in public.

But even in public, until Flock and it's ilk came along, we had the privacy of being just a face in the crowd. The people who saw you on main street were different from the people that saw you on 2nd street, were different from the people who saw you leaving your home. There was no database and no recognition software to stitch all of the sightings together to form a coherent record of your movements.

It's that tracking and recording that people object to.

This. Madoff didn't get in trouble until he started fleecing people who were richer than he was. Then it became an issue.

Had he done those things, you would have heard me complain.

I simply don't remember being hassled to show anyone my vaxination card.

At the same time, improving technology has biisted productivity. Social Security will be fine for a long time if it captures some of that enhanced productivity rather than letting the 1% put it all in their pockets.

I would argue that giving the AI agency is like taking both hands off of the steering wheel and reading a book instead of properly driving.

Essentially there appears to be a hole in understanding. Whatever dark matter may be, if it exists, it must fit the hole.

Now imagine instead of factory workers, the machines randomly ripped arms off of people who had no association with the factory.

I don't suggest holding the AI responsible, I suggest holding it's USER responsible, just like the driver is held responsible if they fail to keep their car under control and plow into pedestrians.

Since the Wealth of Nations is the cornerstone of Capitalism, I would expect people cheerleading for it to read it. Smith is not god and economics shouldn't be a religion, but The Wealth of Nations is key to understanding how it can work for the benefit of all. His warning about corporate charters was in part inspired by his observation that corporations know nothing of compassion. I'm quite certain that by exceedingly sparingly, he did NOT mean to anyone who fills out a form and pays $150.

Competition also meant more than having 2 or 3 sellers to choose from. He envisioned many sellers and many buyers who were not that far apart in economic power (not his exact words but the jist is within a couple orders of magnitude). I have often observed that the modern economy shows inadequate competition in most if not all markets. Given adequate competition, "value pricing" would be practically impossible.

Agent mode is also where the AI decides that committing a felony is an acceptable risk (even if it isn't). Ask an AI based robot (I know, not yet available) to go buy an ice cream at the truck and it decides the kids surrounding it are an impediment to it's mission and shoves them into traffic.

It might change people's minds if they are made strictly responsible for any crimes committed by the AI.

More real life, an AI decides the production database needs to be deleted even though told not to touch production. AI later matter of factly states it ignored that instruction and the database can't be recovered.

It's more like unpredictable software. I'm not saying we burn it, I'm saying don't give it agency. Only allow it to advise, not take action. I have experimentally used it myself on code, but did not allow it to commit to the repo, only show me it's proposed changes. It even proved somewhat useful at that, though I didn't apply it's changes, it did inspire a similar approach that I implemented and committed.

That a Teflon like surface takes part it? That is new ground.

A key to Capitalism from Smith himself is that it requires strong regulation to keep the playing field level. Smith also warned that charters must be given out exceedingly sparingly and the resulting corporation kept on a tight leash and held strictly to it's charter.

I guess we really blew that one!

But I rather doubt anyone involved in MAGA or others shouting "deregulate all the things!" have ever read "The Wealth of Nations". Most probably can't do it since centuries later the text is quite stilted.

There is no implied malice, that would require understanding what right and wrong are. It doesn't. The training so far for the various AIs seems to be whatever we can grab from the internet or scan from whatever books we can get our hands on.

Are you claiming LLMs are written to create fake social media accounts and launch a smear campaign against a project maintainer who refuses to apply the AI's PR? Because that actually happened. It was prompted to make a few requested changes to a program and get a PR accepted with those changes. And that's what the bot did, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Put another way, would you run a makefile containing several billion rules that you are not allowed to examine first? Because that's what giving agency to LLMs is. Or might you prefer a debug mode where it shows what actions would be taken, but cannot take them? That is what I mean by not giving it agency.