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Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

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Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#41

Post by 0x3f »

rawgabbit wrote: post #14
derrak wrote: post #6

Makes me think of academic papers that overhype their contribution. Also makes me think about AI hype.

For me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?

Human law enforcement hallucinates all the time. This is a bit like a poor argument against self driving.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#42

Post by jcgrillo »

didgetmaster wrote: post #20

This is what scares me the most about AI. You have a handful of really big companies trying to outdo each other as they race to implement it and deploy it as quickly as possible. To try and justify their outrageous capital spending on data centers; they are incentivised to exaggerate its current capabilities and also what it will be capable of 'soon'. There is no time to evaluate each step to make sure it is accurate…

I guess a counterpoint might be Apple's "strategy". Scare quotes because I truly don't know if it was deliberate or just a happy accident. But somehow they've managed to not get so intensively exposed to the downside risk--if the wild claims about AI don't pan out they're not going to lose very much compared with the other megacorps.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#43

Post by asdff »

mememememememo wrote: post #37
asdff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother with all that though? Just ask them to do their job for the party. If they don't, or you suspect they don't align with the party, you just execute them. Don't need tech for this. The tech is just for some people to get rich, not to really enable any new evil that can't already be achieved today with pen and paper and bullet (as modeled extensively in the last century). Put it this way, if Hitler had grok,…

Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed. But you can spy on people under "national security" while keeping them feeling happy enough. And that arrangement can last 1000 years.

Still not convinced that AI is offering anything new here. Especially when the statistics you'd reach for are often like 100 years old or more. Bayes theorem is older than the united states. I think among lay people there is a lot of conflation between AI and statistics, and also a lack of understanding of the state of that field and how mature it is. Nazi Germany of course heavily used statistical modeling and even contracted with IBM to quantify Jewish populations.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#44

Post by achierius »

0x3f wrote: post #41
rawgabbit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?

Human law enforcement hallucinates all the time. This is a bit like a poor argument against self driving.

The last line of GP's comment is key here: "Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?"

This shouldn't make as much of a difference as it does, but due to how our legal system works, it's much harder to get meaningful legal satisfaction when an algorithm (or other inhuman distributed system) commits a crime against a person than when a person does so.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#45

Post by zozbot234 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #21
nostrademons wrote: post #7

Interesting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treatin…

> stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.

Right, options go underwater precisely when the company is not doing well and you are at greatest risk of losing the job. That's not a great risk profile.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#46

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

peacebeard wrote: post #8
nostrademons wrote: post #7

Interesting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treatin…

So in your view, even a useful innovative idea cannot gain traction without being overhyped?

Almost any useful innovation is going to have a right tail of people who overhype it. They shouldn't, and I wish they wouldn't. But if your strategy for evaluating new ideas is to find the biggest sources of hype and fact check them, you're going to systematically undervalue innovation.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#47

Post by [deleted] »

mememememememo wrote: post #19
rawgabbit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?

Ot worse because it didn't hallucinate, and they are coming for you, as a free thinking "radical". They can tell from a long deleted blog post you made in 2005 about green energy.

[deleted]

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#48

Post by JumpCrisscross »

commandlinefan wrote: post #21
nostrademons wrote: post #7

Interesting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treatin…

> stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.

> options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants)

RSUs are also much-less liquid and tightly controllable by companies than actual stock. That has made them attractive to management and insiders.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

mememememememo wrote: post #37
asdff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother with all that though? Just ask them to do their job for the party. If they don't, or you suspect they don't align with the party, you just execute them. Don't need tech for this. The tech is just for some people to get rich, not to really enable any new evil that can't already be achieved today with pen and paper and bullet (as modeled extensively in the last century). Put it this way, if Hitler had grok,…

Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed. But you can spy on people under "national security" while keeping them feeling happy enough. And that arrangement can last 1000 years.

> Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed.

It failed because Nazi Germany was not militarily superior to combination of the nations that it got upset with it externally, not because of any internal failure of control. While its nice to think that Nazi Germany “failing” somehow disproves the viability of the same broad kind of one-party, massacre-the-opposition totalitarianism, it isn't really justified.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#50

Post by bluefirebrand »

asdff wrote: post #33
rawgabbit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?

The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

This is all true, but surely you can see how automating the authoritarian bent of the government still makes things worse than before?
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