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Skynet won and destroyed humanity

dmathieu.com

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Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#131

Post by mindslight »

wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #125
mindslight wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't computers being considered an "other", but rather that other people are using computers to unilaterally scale up the implementation of their own negligence/biases/"policy" while also insulating themselves from corrective feedback or other repercussions. This makes poor results feel willful rather than being considered honest mistakes.

The first part isnt really an assertion of fact but of perspective. Consider if the delivery logistics tracking was executed by men working with paper in an office in the 1920's, and the policy was a managers. That is still "unilateral" as people who are not the manager dont have control over the policy, nor necessarily the capital to create a competitor policy. Additionally, there is corrective feedback. This errant…

Your first part is relying on some assertion that scale makes no difference, when the whole crux of the matter is that it does. If a person bumps into you on the sidewalk, you will give them the benefit of the doubt. If that person has done it to a bunch of other people, you likely won't have as much tolerance. If that person is being paid to get in your way (eg using social engineering to put trashvertisements in people's hands), you likely won't have any.

Your second part is channeling the efficient market fallacy, and then tautologically writing off "small" problems as not important enough. But once again, the problem is the scale itself. Something that hurts 0.01% of customers/users is never going to move the needle of organizational feedback, but at a scale of ten million customers/users that is still 1000 people that get hurt. Human scale limits fan out and allows direct feedback, surveillance industry scale does neither.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#132

Post by brulard »

waveBidder wrote: post #108
ljsprague wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just invent birth control followed by Tinder.

Kids are extremely expensive when you have to raise them to 18 with no return. We should have social security, but for the young.

What do you mean by "no return"?

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#133

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

mindslight wrote: post #131
wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first part isnt really an assertion of fact but of perspective. Consider if the delivery logistics tracking was executed by men working with paper in an office in the 1920's, and the policy was a managers. That is still "unilateral" as people who are not the manager dont have control over the policy, nor necessarily the capital to create a competitor policy. Additionally, there is corrective feedback. This errant…

Your first part is relying on some assertion that scale makes no difference, when the whole crux of the matter is that it does. If a person bumps into you on the sidewalk, you will give them the benefit of the doubt. If that person has done it to a bunch of other people, you likely won't have as much tolerance. If that person is being paid to get in your way (eg using social engineering to put trashvertisements in pe…

I think there are flaws in this reasoning.

To reiterate my point from before incase there was misunderstanding: Scale applies before computers. If it is matter of subjugation now it would also apply 200 years ago to designated bread makers in London, or to clerical errors involving iron shipments in the 1860s that resulted in ship crew deaths. Even if you see those as the same as now, the poster I was responding to seemed upset by the otherness of the machine made decision, the algorithmic identity, which is the topic of the post, hence me making a point of it.

Lets now consider your idea that scale makes things evil:

Would any level of scale of production or service beyond your nearest friends and family implicitly become evil? No service is 100% efficient. Mistakes resulting in a few cents increased costs on any mass produced goods result in millions of dollars of cost absorbed by consumers. That isnt a statement of harm, it is just fact. But the alternative is no bread for most people. Its just a matter of practicality.

Is all bread that is not homemade evil to you?

Thirdly, companies often make corrections for minority error cases. This happens all the time in video games played by millions of people. They will patch out some bug that affected a small minority of players.

There is a limited amount of effort that can be put forth to solve problems. Ranking problems from largest to smallest is not an unreasonable policy. I just dont know what your criticisms would lead you to propose as practical alternatives. It seems pointless.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#134

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

skissane wrote: post #129
wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you are correct in that the mexican restraunt conjures up images of typical restraunt. I do think there is associative bleed. I think thoughts do not follow formal logic and words function as embeddings. My suspicion is the word "slave" in english has other encodings in it that arent strictly the general definition of slave, and that the high magnitude of those signals within the slave embedding will ellicit un…

> However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery I think “slavery” has much higher salience in the US than in the Western world in general. How many other nations fought a civil war over the topic?

Well historically I assume there have been many nations that had slaves, but the slaves were either subjugted to the point of losing their identity, or it was not racial.

The US has a self inflicted complex about it. People in Japan dont feel sorry about the Korean rapes. Descendants of slave owners the world over are free from ancestral guilt.

I do think the sensetivity is unreasonable.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#135

Post by whythre »

brulard wrote: post #132
waveBidder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids are extremely expensive when you have to raise them to 18 with no return. We should have social security, but for the young.

What do you mean by "no return"?

We aren’t an agrarian society so children (and the labor they represent on the farm) are not a financial asset, they are a financial liability.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#136

Post by [deleted] »

wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #119
opwieurposiu wrote: post #65

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…

if the same circumstance happend due to human clerical error by a local delivery shop would you consider it enslavement or just an honest mistake. I think theres a weird tribal alignment angle in your interpretation of the scenario. You consider computers and machines to be an other, and so in this circumstance youre mind is framing it as subjugation.

[deleted]

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#137

Post by mindslight »

wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #133
mindslight wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first part is relying on some assertion that scale makes no difference, when the whole crux of the matter is that it does. If a person bumps into you on the sidewalk, you will give them the benefit of the doubt. If that person has done it to a bunch of other people, you likely won't have as much tolerance. If that person is being paid to get in your way (eg using social engineering to put trashvertisements in pe…

I think there are flaws in this reasoning. To reiterate my point from before incase there was misunderstanding: Scale applies before computers. If it is matter of subjugation now it would also apply 200 years ago to designated bread makers in London, or to clerical errors involving iron shipments in the 1860s that resulted in ship crew deaths. Even if you see those as the same as now, the poster I was responding to s…

From Wikipedia:

> As of December 31, 2020, the platform [DoorDash] was used by 450,000 merchants, 20,000,000 consumers, and over one million delivery couriers ("Dashers")

Do you have examples of bread makers or ship crews where a handful of people directed a million workers, directly without intermediaries that could make their own decisions?

> Lets now consider your idea that scale makes things evil: Would any level of scale of production or service beyond your nearest friends and family implicitly become evil?

The flaw is in your reasoning. Just because some level of scaling is good, does not mean that any level of scaling is good. You're ignoring that quantitative differences create qualitative differences.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#138

Post by h2zizzle »

opwieurposiu wrote: post #65

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…

This has happened to me. I can't remember the explanation, but the solution for deliverypeople caught by it is kind of fun. Ideally, the restaurant will just remake the order, but if they won't, it's sometimes advantageous to just pay for a second iteration of the order and deliver that. You see, at this point, the platform will have run up the delivery fee considerably, trying to get the order delivered - often to considerably above the cost of the food (that's why so many people were taking it). I'm sure this could backfire if the platform decides to cancel the order in-transit, but it might be worth risking if the fee is high enough (or if you'd eat the food yourself if you could no longer deliver it).

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#139

Post by brulard »

whythre wrote: post #135
brulard wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "no return"?

We aren’t an agrarian society so children (and the labor they represent on the farm) are not a financial asset, they are a financial liability.

But couldn't they be considered an investment? For possible support (emotional, financial and other) in old age.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#140

Post by datadrivenangel »

post_break wrote: post #79

If skynet just made a ton of terminator fembots they could kill humanity just by pairing with every male on the planet. No bloodshed.

This is the plot of Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross, except there was no skynet, the humans just preferred it.
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