So this is the future-billionaires won't just sell us services, they'll trap us in entire ecosystems they control. I'd be more surprised if X doesn't eventually turn into one of them in recent future.
I'm always struck by how sci-fi writers, in a way, act like prophets. It's as if common sense or imagination keeps pointing us toward the same outcomes. As strange as it sounds, if we don't wipe ourselves out, we somehow already know what the future holds.
I’m struck by how some still seem unable to grasp the power of soft influence. Africa now has even fewer incentives to side with anyone but China. America’s strength has long rested on its deep alliances and its knack for creating prosperity abroad—but that advantage is eroding fast.
Are you struck at the possibility of a inner-city family on welfare, or poor rural areas thinking that the US should be spending fungible dollars on them and not someone half way across the world?
They do by lowering taxes. This money can be used to keep local communities funded.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
Well they are not doing that they actually planned to cut local welfare even more. So you make your poorer people poorer and lost influence over the world. I'm honestly struck with that.
Politicians which are drastically cutting foreign aid usually doesn't increase it locally because they do not agree with the whole concept.
They do by lowering taxes. This money can be used to keep local communities funded.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
We're there any situation that first conclusion from AI was completely changed? Can you give generally examples of situations where it changed or significantly improved overall result? It sounds cool.
I would be interested to know how ofter "oscillations" occur, where they flip flop from being too "agreeable" to challenges (which probably is just a sparse latent space). This happens to me pretty frequently, where you can repeatedly say "no that's wrong" and the LLM will do a 180, explaining why it was "in fact" wrong and you are "right", repeat.
I guess the biggest security advantage of any of these old critical systems is fact that they are not connected to the internet. At least I hope they are not.
Indeed. But to be fair, if it’s framed as "protecting the vulnerable" — for example, as a tool to prevent hate speech — liberals would likely support it as well. Or you can always use the classic catch-all: "protecting children from online predators." If it grants politicians more power, it’s almost always useful to them. It's rare for them to believe the government should not have more authority. It’s really just a matter of framing it the right way.
As tech elites lost their untouchable image of being pure prodigies and visionaries, it became clearer — especially after scandals like Cambridge Analytica — that many of them operate like ordinary, ruthless capitalists. Public trust declined as more people moved online and more abuses came to light. Instead of fully acknowledging this shift, many of these elites seem to interpret the criticism — much of which comes from media and universities, which do lean left — as purely ideological attacks. From my perspective, it’s a textbook case of cognitive dissonance: their self-image as bold innovators clashes with how they are increasingly seen from the outside, and the natural human reaction is to blame the critics rather than adjust the self-image.
It's funny that the "economic anxiety" thesis for the rise in populism might also apply to tech elites. They hardly cared a few years back when the NYT and other liberal media organs started bashing tech nonstop while the boom was in full swing. Then they started swinging to the right just as the previous administration started unwinding ZIRP.
It's also clear that the big players always thought these things. In this article, Andreessen got mad and founded right-wing echo chambers because left-wing thinkers though censoring anti-racists was bad. Musk has been an egregiously racist person in an egregiously racist family and has never respected the rule of law.
For a while these people felt like they had to pretend to be decent, pro-social humans so they could keep making money: that seems great. More people should pretend not to be racist assholes.
I wonder how much of this is that they got so rich "you can't make more money" stopped being a meaningful threat.
I would say they really believed it all and weren't "bad" at the start because they perceived themselves as enlighted individuals. Then first scandals appeared and they got stuck in echo chambers and endless cope driven circle jerk.
For me the cringiest part of all is sudden strong urge to appear strong and masculine. It is always full package.
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