>Third, if and when software liability becomes law and covers open source software included in a product, then companies will finally invest substantially in the open source software ecosystem.
This is delusional. Companies will stop releasing open source a software if it cost them money to do it. It is already enough of a fight to just get legal to sign off for ip reasons. If accounting got involved it would simply never happen.
As mentioned in the article: something like 80% of the code shipped is open source, due to developers doing the reasonable thing and including OSS libraries.
Companies can't just walk away from 80%. And if there's liability, rip and replace becomes rip, replace, and still fix issues -- versus just leaving out the rip and replace steps.
The idea that you can understand what experiences produce what behaviours is as much crazier than the idea you can manually tune the weights of gpt4 and get better results.
Ai in its current iteration is a human enhancement tool, not a human replacing tool. I do not understand how anyone who works for a loving thinks this is a bad thing.
It would be like if the industrial revolution made artisanal weaving a million times more efficient without a giant satanic mill.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
Albert Allen Bartlett
If there is even a 0.001% chance of an organism with this artificially tacked on to it getting in to the wild, the experiment is not worth anything to be potentially learned from it.
It could cause our starvation well before we could respond effectively.
I'm old enough to have gone through this about the internet and literate enough to have read about every other time this happened back to the invention of writing which was meant to turn us all into imbeciles according to Socrates.
A lot of the "this has happened since the dawn of time" falls apart when you remember we have created in the past 30 years technologies that have never existed and are changing the nature of civilization.
Your example is spurious. Writing had existed for 2 thousand years when it reached archaic Greece. It had existed in Mycenean Greece almost a thousand years before and been forgotten. A Greek decrying "youth these days rely too much on writing" was already an empty worry from the experience of almost 100 generations.
Touchscreens, smartphones and the Internet are a few decades old at most and no one knows the long term impact of them on civilization or the youth. Pretending it's the same is bad reasoning.
> As middle-aged folk identify the problems with the social networks they grew up with, youngsters may already be moving on.
One of my proudest parenting moments was discovering that a child had independently realised that their online presences ought to be multiple and not trivially correlated.
A better, prouder moment, for all involved, would be not that the child arrived at this marvelous conclusion "independently", for that outcome (by your admission) is quite rare. Else, it would not be remarkable enough for you to comment.
Instead, we want to arm our children with the tools so that they arrive at that same conclusion repeatedly and predictably. Better yet, we would all do better if we simply eliminate such harmful algorithms and creepy practices entirely.
From what I've seen of orgs run by the current generation of activists they always spread themselves too thin trying to do everything. This has been an issue in all well funded ngos I've seen from local hacker spaces to Mozilla.
When you inevitably fail because you can't fix everything the activists leave and you're left with a ruin where there used to be a useful civic organization.
This also causes an issue of coherence for your funder/donors: If I donate to an organization that is focused on X that I support, but then later that organization starts spending 10% of it's time on Y which I don't support - then what?
It's like when I buy stock in Acme which produces widgets, I don't want them starting up or acquiring a doodad business. If I wanted to invest in a doodad business I would do that directly.
No idea if that's the case with Women Who Code though.
This is delusional. Companies will stop releasing open source a software if it cost them money to do it. It is already enough of a fight to just get legal to sign off for ip reasons. If accounting got involved it would simply never happen.