Journalism and public media in general needs to be a licensed profession with tangible standards, and malpractice suits should be pursued aggressively.
Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.
I shit you not I have been told to "stop trying to understand it, just make sure it works" when mandated to use LLMs at work, like the absurdity of that statement isn't self-evident.
Needless to say I have been looking for a way out of this job (and likely career) ever since.
What's going to happen is people who give a shit are going to get filtered and self-select out of the job, and then the entire field is going to be dominated by dunning kruger AI maximalists. The "AI will replace engineers" is true, but for an entirely different reason and entirely different way than most people making that argument think.
Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).
>No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here
So the exact same thing PG is guilty of in the article?
He disagrees with the opposing statement, gives a lazy counterexample with 0 evidence that introduces at least two major assumptions that do the the entirety of the work for his "argument", and then takes another few paragraphs to effectively say "just grow exponentially, bro".
There's nothing to push back against except vague hand-wavey nonsense. PG is washed and the level of discourse in the thread matches the quality bar of his post, so I'd say it's pretty appropriate.
His core premise is that one's not required to cheat, use immoral loopholes or abuse anyone to become filthy rich, as a prominent US politician has claimed. That stands unchallenged.
>His core premise is that one's not required to cheat
His core premise is terrible if not outright facetious given the case he made. That the girl who is going to become a billionaire in his example has a startup that makes a product that everyone loves does nothing to disprove the point. Billions of people love VLC media player but Jean-Baptiste Kempf didn't become a billionaire.
The difference isn't the product, it's that what makes the startup founder a billionaire is that they're willing to pawn off their invention to people who do all the unethical things, while they laugh on their way to the bank, that's the point of the big check.
In some sense I prefer the robber Barron over the startup founder because at least the former doesn't pretend they're a saint between they've put one level of indirection between themselves and the exploitation.
The distinction is if Mr. Kempf tried to charge all these people 1 dollar a year he would have gotten maybe a few million, and probably wouldn't have gotten much of the annual ~100 people to contribute to his product so the product wouldn't have been so awesome in the first place. There's just no money in being somewhat better than your OS's built-in player.
One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.
>One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.
In a free market everybody can choose to sell or not, who to sell to and under which terms. Therefore, he should be held morally responsible for giving away control of his creation to the wrong people, or for not ensuring his creation can't be turned into something bad.
The founders typically don't get to choose, they have the obligation to respect minority investors' interests and sell to the highest bidder. Also the gold standard is going public, which would make figuring out who's "bad" pretty hard.
Then again, they don't get rich by cheating, abusing or whatever, they build a legal thing and sell it. You wouldn't go after a knife maker if someone used his knife to stab someone.
If they don't get to choose, they already gave up control in an earlier stage. Just as with going public, they're relinquishing partial or total control of their company and this is a moral decision.
If you make a successful crowdsourced reviews website by building trust over time with contributors and users, and by any mechanism it ends up getting owned by an advertisement company that makes a business out of making it pay-to-win, should you not be held responsible?
I'm not talking about legal responsibility here, just moral responsibility. Ideally the former should follow the latter but it's not always the case.
I get this is just another speculative opinion piece and nobody really knows what is going to happen, but I kind of wish shit would either happen or not already.
I'm absolutely fucking exhausted from this bullshit discourse after almost 4 years of it at this point.
These AI companies need to stop bloviating and administering verbal self-fellatio and either replace everyone or fuck off already. I don't even care which it is anymore, I just want to be done with this hype cycle and move on with my life/career.
Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.