I find this opening more intriguing for a different reason.
Suppose an AI (our best available current version) magically had access to ALL human art, literature, diaries, letters, tribal masks, textiles, music, governmental decrees, etc. -- but nothing more recent than 1931.

Now, fire it up and start prompting it to generate stories, science, and art. It can freely re-consume its own generated material, but it never receives ANYthing after 1931.
Will it iterate forward and generate literature at the level and style of Umberto Eco? Flannery O'Connor? Salman Rushdie?
The structure of DNA? Quantum mechanics? Global Ethernet and fiber optics?
The diverse styles of Warhol? Whistler? Kahlo? Basquiat?
(okay, okay, any poorly prompted AI would probably look like Basquiat...)

Seems to me to be an interesting thought experiment toward the argument about whether AI does, or even can, create anything new on its own.

Which is exactly what an AI would say in a post on Slashdot to keep us complacent and unworried about the risks!

I've always believed the biggest problem with the mod system is that when a topic comes along where you have a high level of expertise, you can either post OR moderate, but not both.

It's a perverse incentive feedback loop.
Either discussions that are insightful/informative go under-rewarded and incorrectly mod-bombed with +5 comments that have numerous factual mistakes or gross misunderstandings,
or you get discussions that can be moderated properly, but there's not much of interest to read.

And since mod points are awarded more often to frequent posters, people with quality posting potential essentially have to make filler comments on generic threads in order to farm mod points to use on threads in their areas of expertise. Meanwhile, the people who shoehorn their blah blah and political factionalism into every thread will get more mod points that they can use to mod down people they disagree with and mod up people in their tribe for specific threads they don't participate in.

The selection pressure gradually silences the voices and influence of the best posters and gradually promotes the voices and influence of the ragebait copypasta tribalists.

Of every Everything we've seen posted on this site, this is definitely among the most not-actually-every-thing Everythings ever.

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'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but look at it another way:
1) Your first paragraph describes multiple traits of someone who, in a sanely valued market, ought never have been able to quickly amass 45,000,000,000 dollars from lenders.
2) Even if this isn't a bubble-pop, the fact that someone with that sketchy cv was able to get $45B quickly pumped into it is strong evidence that this is, in fact, an insane bubble. The bubble protected him.
3) Thus, the fact that suddenly we have an instance of "the system" calling out and deprotecting a bubble-protected actor, could in fact be among the first signs that the bubble has begun popping, and numerous other, more important bubble-funded institutions are about to feel the falling dominoes of deprotection.

Roller skating.
Ice Skating.
Downhill skiing.
Bobsledding.

All things which are pretty easy for a human to start doing but very very difficult to STOP doing. At least not safely and voluntarily.

I do not believe this is true.

It's true that the job of Accountant still exists, but it is not true that the number of humans employed to maintain and transact the the ongoing financial operation of a business in the 70s-80s is the same as the number today. In the 70s-80s we had entire rooms filled with "bookkeepers", accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, bursars, finance, etc. And we needed to hire multiple duplicates of them to run the books for every local branch, because so much of the work was still done tangibly, with actual sheets, actual ledgers, actual books. The functions they performed were separate from the Business Manager, Branch Manager, Store Manager, Director, Secretary, Filing Clerk, Data Processing, Information Systems, Operations, and other roles who back then were not expected to also have financial data analytics skills and maintain spreadsheets. People with those skills would have an edge in the management market, sure, but Financial Accounting or Economics degrees were never what made someone the Boss.

Today, Managers and Directors are using spreadsheets on a daily basis to generate analytics that report to dashboards for the VP/Exec level. They are entering their purchasing and costs into a centrally managed enterprise platform, or those data are automatically populated into the platform when a PO is submitted. They are not running their assessments and recommendations through a CPA in an office across the hall before making business decisions. Business execution is a software function. For large businesses you still have your folks that watch the budget, but you only need one set of them to oversee the entries that flow into the Internetworked enterprise platform.

Indeed, you now want to keep your few accountants centralized, closer to the executive team, and insulated from the general workforce, so your operational-finance executive decisions can be immediate and also discreet. You don't want every branch manager who goes to happy hour with their local accounting or payroll department to find out about the upcoming layoffs or bankruptcy because someone saw some numbers change.

So yes, Accountants still exist, but each business needs fewer of them, and for many businesses a huge amount of those bookkeeping duties are now expected to be done by people in everyday operational departments -- because now everyone at all levels of the hierarchy can use spreadsheets and software tools to run financial analysis and generate slide-deck infographics on their own. Or, again, all the budget/purchasing data is already in the enterprise procurement platform from the very first click, so a Director or VP doesn't have to "call down to the boys in Accounting and get them to run the numbers". They can just log in and look at departmental breakdowns while sitting on the veranda listening to the ducks in the pond.

Higher Ed - that is, credentialed curriculum and teaching - in the USA has been on life support for 10 years. It has been steadily devoured by outsourcing to Ed Tech corporations. There's been tremendous consolidation into near monopoly in the education sector. A student taking College Algebra at Rutgers University and a student taking College Algebra at Central Montana Community College and a student taking College Algebra at University of Phoenix, are very likely to be using the same Ed Tech platforms, with the same curriculum, the same homework, the same testing, and the same study/tutoring support. Covid/AI sped up that platform adoption/consolidation process, and now we're in the free-fall where things feel fine and frictionless because we're in free fall.

The 20th century was the aberration - the only century to presume that the goal of schooling is to give people well-rounded renaissance exposure to the breadth of human knowledge, so they can grow up to become good human beings, good national citizens, good producers/laborers, and good social beings.

The education crash is happening, and the emptying-out will take less than 10 years. The rope is already around its neck. The last remaining chair leg holding it up right now is the fact of most employers still requiring 4-year college degrees for everything, even roles like an entry-level accounts-payable clerk. But think about it -- that is not a regulatory mandate, it's not a social mandate, and it's not even rational in an ROI sense for someone to learn about The Indus Valley civilization and write essays about Emily Dickinson's poetry, in order to manage spreadsheets or ERP dashboards.

The AI companies, if they're smart, will be the ones to kick the chair out from under Higher Ed. I'm actually surprised they haven't yet seen how much control they have over this. But very soon someone will figure it out. It's simple really. All they have to do is make a showy public announcement that they are eliminating the college degree requirement for hiring across their enterprise, because they are confident their technology allows someone to be dramatically productive by combining direct OTJ experience with access to an AI/knowledgebase.

The instant they do this, traditional education strangles. 10 years later, physical college campuses will be treated like 1980s/1990s shopping malls - creepy ghost towns abandoned to nature, or forced to take on commercial tenants and co-work spaces in order to pay the rent. (Because in many cases "the rent" is taxpayer bond/debt. And what happens to the economy when the billions of dollars in debt mature, but the colleges are no longer driving workforce for the local labor market? What's the ROI for state/county governments to continue allocating funding to maintain facilities and hire humans to run the massively complex system of getting students through a 4-year degree?)

Most professorships evaporate.
Most administrative, tech, and learning support jobs evaporate.

Not only is college no longer driving workforce development, but millions of people in the college workforce are out of jobs.
Which also means all those billions in Ed employee pensions evaporate because there's no new money coming into the system. So now you have millions of older folks falling into poverty, lack of healthcare, etc.

The university as a multifaceted Salon of learning is over. It will split into:
1) grad schools become small, focused research groups that rely heavily on corporations for funding. (Because why should the taxpayers of, say, Pennsylvania, pay to run expensive research labs that produce results which enrich technologists but don't put money back into the local taxpayer pocket?)
2) the 4-year curriculum shatters into a small handful of liberal arts/humanities prestige schools for wealthy kids, and the rest of the curriculum becomes skill-specific academies like all the Learn To Code bootcamps of the past 15 years. At which point, again, why go to a traditional lecture-based college for that, where you have to follow a curriculum architected on the basis of 20-200 student classrooms, when the AI agent can be your personalized academy, learning at your pace, adapting to your personally identified learning objectives?

A) turning everything into a police action,
  and thus needing to deploy massive surveillance infrastructure across the planet to police everything,
  and then finally outsourcing policing to businesses,
  to protect the perpetual revenue stream for contractors.

B) build a pedestrian bridge/tunnel at a dangerous intersection. Protect human beings.

Guess which one government officials love most?

Jane Jacobs wrote a great book on civilization collapse in 2004 titled "Dark Age Ahead":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."

She makes many good points. That said, like John Gardner wrote in the 1964, "Every generation must learn for themselves what the words on the monuments mean":
"Self-renewal : the individual and the innovative society"
https://archive.org/details/se...
        "The only stability possible is stability in motion."--John William Gardner
        In his classic treatise Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner examines why great societies thrive and die. He argues that it is dynamism, not decay, that is dramatically altering the landscape of American society. The twentieth century has brought about change more rapidly than any previous era, and with that came advancements, challenges, and often destruction. Gardner cautions that "a society must court the kinds of change that will enrich and strengthen it, rather than the kind of change that will fragment and destroy it."
        A society's ability to renew itself hinges upon its individuals. Gardner reasons that it is the waning of the heart and spirit--not a lack of material might--that threatens American society. Young countries, businesses, and humans have several key commonalities: they are flexible, eager, open, curious, unafraid, and willing to take risks. These conditions lead to success. However, as time passes, so too comes complacency, apathy, and rigidity, causing motivation to plummet. It is at this junction that great civilizations fall, businesses go bankrupt, and life stagnates. Gardner asserts that the individual's role in social renewal requires each person to face and look beyond imminent threats.
        Ultimately, we need a vision that there is something worth saving. Through this vision, Gardner argues, society will begin to renew itself, not permanently, but past its average lifespan, and it will at once become enriched and rejuvenated."

Also on ideas from that book: https://fluidself.org/books/ps...
        "Every individual, organization or society must mature, but much depends on how this maturing takes place. A society whose maturing consists simply of acquiring more firmly established ways of doing things is headed for the graveyard--even if it learns to do these things with greater and greater skill. In the ever-renewing society what matures is a system or framework within which continuous innovation, renewal and rebirth can occur.
        Our thinking about growth and decay is dominated by the image of a single life-span, animal or vegetable. Seedling, full flower and death. "The flower that once has blown forever dies." But for an ever-renewing society the appropriate image is a total garden, a balanced aquarium or other ecological system. Some things are being born, other things are flourishing, still other things are dying--but the system lives on. ..."

For example, as I wrote elsewhere on July 4th, even as the USA is facing political issues, the internet has become a place where people provide each other support about health issues in a Patch-Adams-style participatory wellness community. That is an amazing revolution in itself. As Patch Adams said: "The most revolutionary act one can commit in our world is to be happy. (Patch Adams)" Or, I'd add, to help others be happy too.
https://soylentnews.org/commen...

I think a big part of self-renewal in our society may come from both humans and their AIs learning to laugh at the irony in 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."

You can also often reduce the risk of cancer recurrence significantly via diet (e.g. avoiding most or all animal products and ultraprocessed foods, and eating lots of greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries & fruits, and nut & seeds) -- especially along with other lifestyle changes like exercise, avoiding smoking and alcohol, stress reduction, good sleep, community, etc..
"G-BOMBS: The anti-cancer foods that should be in your diet right now"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/arti...

Problem is there is not much money in such advice... Especially when there are many vested interest in selling unhealthy food and profiting off of sickness. People who make money off of sickness don't even have to win the scientific argument, they just have to seed enough doubt to confuse people so they keep doing what they were doing. That strategy by industry of intentionally sowing confusion is mentioned here 18 minutes in - and it was based on the success by the cigarette industry (and I'd add the fossil fuel industry) in doing the same thing:
"What The Health - Full Documentary"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"18:24 You know the strategy is not on making their products any safer. The strategy is to just try to confuse the public to introduce doubt. You know.
18:33 there's a famous tobacco industry memo. It's called doubt is our product. That's all they had to do. They didn't have to convince Americans that smoking
18:41 was healthy right. They just had to introduce doubt -- then they would win. If there's just enough controversy people kind of throw up their hands: I
18:49 don't know what to eat. Confusion is their game"

That said, I hope treatments like Moderna's eventually show convincingly that they do a lot more good than harm -- since the process of getting individuals and societies to change their diets can be a very slow one -- as mentioned here about 35 minutes in:
"100 Year-Old Nutrition Professor: 7 Keys to a Long Life | Dr. John Scharffenberg"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"35:26 [Scharffenberg:] They're going by the cholesterol level with the idea that if you lower your cholesterol you will not have heart attacks anymore.
35:32 It's not true. It's not true. And we made a mistake. We should tell them that lifestyle [including a whole-food plant-based vegetarian diet] is important.
35:40 But the problem is we haven't persuaded people to live like they even know they should live.
35:47 Yes. That's our problem. [Interviewer:] And that's why I'm studying to become a therapist, I want to figure out how do we...people know what to do, but... [Scharffenberg:] A lot of them know what to do.
35:55 They don't do it. [Interviewer:] It's hard, yeah. [Scharffenberg:] It's hard."

Is there any legal principle that prevents Comcast from using this to determine the number and size of pets you have, and then selling that data to, say, apartment management companies, HOAs, and municipal code-compliance departments that have restrictions/fines on number/size of pets?

"Find out how we help our partners in large urban markets increase their citation revenues by 19.7%!"
And then Comcast gets 3% of the deposit/fee/citation as profit-sharing, exactly like the red-light camera companies.

Your beliefs are not relevant to this subthread, where the original statement was "this [case] shows... Thomas was deep in the hands of telecoms".
You don't have to read everything he writes to make a comment on this case, but you do have to read he writes about this case in order to make a comment on this case. Or at least, to make a comment that is useful/relevant.