Fair insight, unfortunately.

Unfortunately that makes my point theoretical instead of actual in this instance - ultimately, they (we) can't be so short-sighted to believe that the 'accidental' damage will always be limited to a 'friendly' target. If they CAN escape boundaries (esp if they are testing in the wild) eventually they're going to hit a 3M or P&G who doesn't give a fuck, or who suffers major political/consumer fallout that isn't so easily firewalled within 'interested actors'.

But my original point persists: if we legally set '10x damages' as the precedent, even the wild valuations of these shareholders would have to be tempered (I guess I'm assuming SOME sense of reality in the process) to recognize the catastrophic/explosive liabilities & maybe invest with a little more trepidation?

I realize as I'm typing this it even sounds naive to me.

Then again, there is the little-remembered bit of Eisenhower's farewell address.
https://www.archives.gov/miles...

Immediately after his (much repeated) warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he them went on:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Funny few people remember that one. It sure looks like these scholars are chasing the money.

Ooh. I've always wanted to be a Geocities warlock. Or is that Geocities Warlock(tm)?

But seriously, loving the irony of Elon's petulant rebranding coming back to bite him in the a**.

The fact that twitter.com still exists as a redirect actually strengthens and weakens their claim to abandonment. A mere URL with no content does not generally qualify as use in commerce. And the existence of that redirect without Twitter branding on the resulting site makes it clear that abandonment is willful, because it indicates that the old name is no longer intended to be used, and that they don't have any future product plans with that name (because otherwise they would have a landing page saying that the new Twitter was coming soon).

IMO, X clawing back the Twitter trademark should be rather difficult for them at this point, famous or not, barring concrete documentation created prior to the 3-year limit showing future plans to reintroduce the mark in the very near future.

A few points:
1) maybe you didn't follow my argument: that's why it's farcical to believe that these companies are wasting money buying/destroying them when they are digitally available. Why would they waste $$ they don't have to?

2) FWIW, that's the 1901 edition, the 1915 3rd ed was (as the author says) largely rewritten with updated information not available for the 1901.

3) Do you realize your comment is literally justifying scanning and preserving books that aren't yet available?

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."

Isn't there a clear bright line of liability here?
If the hugging face event cost hugging face (hypothetically) $250,000 to fix, how is the ai creator not instantly on the hook for a multiple of those damages?

It feels like we should quickly establish say a 10x multiplier as standard penalty for ai caused damages.

I know it's a shitty post facto tool and yes, it has failed plenty of times, but product liability is a well-precedented path (ie no new law approach has to be created) to compelling corporate responsibility. If this were the case, even a trillion dollar market value would feel shallow compared to potential liabilities.

Someone please name one rare, valuable book that has been destroyed. I'm still waiting.

Nobody has answered my criticisms of this particular Frankenstein story:
1) there's essentially nothing IN rare books that LLMs benefit from
2) rare old books are difficult to ocr in the first place, when reprints are both easier to scan AND cheaper.

This entire contrived hysteria is even more amusing as people basically don't read anymore, not generally. Oh heavens! They're destroying the books NOBODY READS? Really? That's what you're weeping about?

The only remaining meaningful contemporary book sales are women reading their own particular flavor of smut.
https://www.pensandpoison.org/...

Less than half of adults say they've read ONE BOOK in the last year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

I love old books. I'm currently reading Rogers 3rd ed (1915) of A History of Babylonia and Assyria and it's delightful. An absolute pleasure to read from the skill of the author, the comprehensiveness of the information (without a tedious agenda to flog, imagine!), to the very tactile experience of leather bound, deckle-edged paper. A joy every minute I'm reading it.

I would genuinely join you if there truly was a threat against old books.
But this? This is a manipulated hysteria contrived for some reason, maybe an experiment to see if they could spur nearly-illiterate sheeple to rise up to 'save' something they absolutely care nothing about.

In relative terms, they're marking it up more. But ask yourself which hurts people's pocketbooks more: the $110 that the cheap Android tablet maker takes as profit or the $400 that Apple takes? Consumers don't care about percents. They care about dollars. And Apple's profit margin on their tablets is almost 4x that of their cheapest competition.

Alternatively that's three spare tablets for when the first one breaks. As soon as you're more than 2x the price of the cheapest competition, unless users absolutely have to have the capabilities of the expensive one, a lot of stuff like build quality ceases to matter, etc.

Right! That's exactly it. I was part of "Gen X" myself, and while I had friends who lived the whole "latchkey kid" lifestyle to the max? It really wasn't the norm to just be unsupervised all day or night.

I remember my folks both worked, but my mom went to working only part-time, early in the morning until around the lunch hour, when we were younger. She hired an older lady as a part-time nanny for us while she was gone. When we got older, mom was always home by the time school let out - so we barely knew she was ever gone.

And also true that even for the teens I knew who had a house to themselves after school each day until bedtime? Their parent(s) weren't just buying them electric motorcycles or any of that like you see going on today. Obviously, the Internet wasn't anything like it is today. Even as a hard-core computer geek though? I called and ran my own computer bulletin board system where it was just really a local niche community of like-minded people dialing in with modems. Most heated arguments that came up on a BBS got squashed when the BBS operator decided he had enough and banned all of them. It just wasn't *anything* like what goes on now where people get video-recorded against their will in high resolution just so someone can get famous on TikTok, or ?

Rei: Do you actually work for Amazon in a capacity where you're informed on how they're obtaining these books?

I'm asking for a couple reasons.

1. We all know Amazon has plenty of money to be able to afford to buy rare, out-of-print books that are difficult to obtain. I'd be surprised if they refrained from doing so if that meant their AI risked not having some of that knowledge/information while a competitor's did. I'm not saying the guy tasked with being manager over the disposable labor doing the book scanning is authorized to make direct choices about what books to buy. I'm saying someone in Amazon corporate, in charge of the AI project itself, was probably given the funding to buy what he/she felt was needed.

2. The original article's anonymous interview with the low-level worker sounded very accurate with such statements as the details/orders changing daily and everything feeling disorganized. I can speak with some authority that that's exactly how it feels when you work for them in a non-management capacity. Multiple layers of management are dictating new processes or policies in a constant stream, and then often? The entire thing is up-ended when top level management makes a company-wide decree or mandate. Your team lead/manager is even liable to change on short notice. Their push to constantly "reinvent" causes a whole lot of reinventing of the same wheel another department or team already invented, and it's kind of a zoo. That's why I'd also take their comments as legit when they express concerns some of the books appeared to be obscure titles, etc.

I have to agree. I'm not defending Facebooks' practices, but at the same time? It seems to me social media as a whole can become addictive, or promote bad ideas to kids or teens. You have to control this at the parental level ... not just depend on corporations to self-police it all.

So sure... slap them with large fines and use the money for good, where you can. I'm not opposed. But your kid or teen wouldn't be spending all day on social media if you controlled it as their parent. By the time they're old enough to legally move out of your house? Then it's too late for you to try to "fix" anything they're doing. But before that, they live under your roof and by your rules.

Did conservative politicians decide that almost all young males needed to be put on Ritalin? Or that teh solution to self esteem issues was teaching children they needed to be rewarded for getting their shoes on the right feet? or that Or that male teachers needed phased out because all men are sexual predators? Or that schools can assist in transitioning children to a different "gender," and that the child's parents have no right to be told? Yeah, that was all conservatives causing all problems.

Your hatred of anything other than the far left wing is showing.

And before you take the standard accusing me of being in support of all things conservative, I do believe that conservatives played a part in school problems. There is blame to go around. Funding problems, Issues with banning books. You on the other hand, are not capable of seeing anything beyond a narrative fed to you by people who are on a faction of the left that cannot take accountability. And in fine fettle, you don't either.

That's literally what I said, you dumb pillock.

The fact that Canada is insisting on their right to propagandize their own populace doesn't change that it's propaganda.
Of COURSE it's still 'soft power', even if the target is their own disaffected population.

Duh?

I think a two party democratic system is terrible and it should be easier to create new parties. The current two should likely be split.

My reasoning is that a democratic system should not be treated as a sports game of two teams. There are plenty of views and we need variety of representation, not to simply fall in line with the two options available or be treated as an outsider.

Yes, but not just parents. Schools, media, pop culture. All had a part. And the public schools had an outsized effect.

I managed to keep my son away from the worst of it. Kept him off the drugs the schools wanted him on, taught him that self esteem comes from accomplishment, not because the teacher told him he was the center of the universe, and he had great potential. He's doing okay. His Ritalin drugged up friends? Not quite as well.

And the worst thing we taught the kids is in your answer. It's always someone else's fault.