masterspace

Fair enough, I am just being overly angry and hateful.

It's not entirely clear what he's referring to, he just uses the term AI broadly in the context of people being worried about job losses, then talks about the reduction in secret police costs that enables, then discusses applying AI to physics.

It's not the same idea, as I didn't advocated s studying them when they were authoritarian shitholes who were actively slaughtering their neighbours.

I claim it is a corporate problem because of things such as Meta detecting when a teen girl deleted a selfie and then showing her beauty ads.

Yeah, that's real evil and fucked up, but the reality is that even before doing that, Facebook / Instagram was still leading to a noticeable increase in the suicide rate of teen girls.

Also these kids are going to get older, go on social media, and then have the same problems. But because they are older it seems like people don't care about them anymore.

That's like saying that you should let teens smoke cigarettes because they'll get older and get exposed to them anyways. There's inherent benefit in delaying exposure to harm, especially when your brain is developing and changing so much.

Also social media is really useful for minorities, such as queer people, to find community and support which is especially important if they happen to have bad parents or live in an unsupportive area.

I do get that and am very sympathetic to that use case. However, on balance, it still fucks up more kids then it saves. I think the appropriate middle ground is device / account based age verification without requiring IDs and documents. Then it at least leaves the door open for an older brother or concerned community member to get a kid who needs an outlet an unlocked phone, while still more broadly discouraging it's use and denormalizing it.

Tl;dw: he has two points:

1. That between cameras and now AI monitoring, it has just drastically reduced the cost of running an authoritarian regime. He claims that running the Stahsi used to cost like 20% of the government budget, but can now be done for next to nothing and if will be harder for governments to resist that temptation.

2. That there hasn't been much progress in the world of physics since the 70s, so what happens if you point AI and it's compute power at the field of physics? It could see wondrous progress and a world of plenty.

Personally I think point 1 is genuinely interesting and valid, and that point 2 is kind of incredible nonsense. Yes, all other fields are just simplified forms of physics, and physics fundamentally underlies all of them. That doesn't mean that no new knowledge has come from those fields, and that doesn't mean that new knowledge in physics automatically improves them. Physics has in many ways, done its job. Obviously there's still more to learn, but between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can model most human scale processes in our universe, with incredible precision. The problem is that that the closer we get to understanding the true underlying math of the universe, the harder it is to compute that math for a practical system... at a certain point, it requires a computer on the scale of the universe to compute.

Most of our practical improvements in the past decade have and will come from chemistry, and biology, and engineering in general, because there is far more room to improve human scale processes by finding shortcuts, and patterns, and designing systems to behave the way we want. AI's computer scale pattern matching ability will undoubtedly help with that, but I think it's less likely that it can make any true physics breakthroughs, nor that those breakthroughs would impact daily life that much.

Again though, I think that point number 1 is incredibly valid. At the end of the day incentives, and specifically cost incentives, drive a massive amount of behaviour. It's worth thinking about how how AI changes them.

I don't have to, I just have to name one better than Russian. Learn Ukrainian, Polish, German, French Finnish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Romanian, etc then consider Russian.

German culture and heritage was destroyed by the world wars. What remains is not what was there pre-WWII.

And I'm not cancelling or destroying anything. I'm just prioritizing cultures worth preserving over those that have been poisoned by a century of dictatorship, misinformation, and hate.

It's not magic, it's very simple, and it's what Pornhub et al keep calling for: device based verification.

You do it once when you set up your OS / OS Account, and then your device can anonymously tell websites whether you are are old enough or young enough without sharing any other info.

And if it's happening at the device level, that means that credentials and actual paper IDs arent even required, you just need a system that lets parents lock down a child device to only use their account, and set that up with their age for them (or have one of their teachers do it).

Reality: you make your money off being a social media hack who pushes outrage for clicks.

Congratulations on being an outlier.

Social media increases the rate of suicide overall though, in addition to creating increased feelings of isolation, increased inattentiveness, increased levels of rage, increased levels of political polarization, etc.

Quite frankly you have absolutely nothing to base your claim about it being a corporate problem on. There's no evidence that Lemmy / Mastodon / Pixelfed's "neutral" algorithms are any less toxic or soul destroying then Facebook or Tiktok's. I personally suspect they are to some extent, but it's also very clear that many many many people are simply addicted to rage and will find and create it online regardless of algorithm.

Unintended consequences, like being happier, having lower suicide rates, and being less manipulated by toxic corporate advertising?

Don't threaten us with a good time.