Ed Zitron of Better Offline and Where’s Your Ed At engages regularly in a unilateral war of aggression against Sam Altman. He has done a ton of research on Sam, as he has for other “rot economy” tech figures, and thus has a sophisticated factual scaffold built around them he can hold them to. For me, it’s just like a… taste, or smell. I’m receiving information from some kind of sense, and it is setting off red lights on the panel. Is that fair? I dunno. If I saw a huge lizard gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, to what extent am I required to give it the benefit of the doubt? We clown ourselves when we hold ourselves to baroque standards of fairness around malefactors like this. They know about the rules, they just think those rules are for other people. They depend on this asymmetry. They rely on it.
There’s a reason these whack jobs always have your deprivation in one hand and universal basic income in the other, and that’s because the subtext is that they’ve distilled human endeavor into a potent liquor and that’s gonna eat a lot of jobs. The strip suggests that there is a context in which all these things can exist, but it may require you to boldly go where no one has gone before. We all know the etymology of Utopia, right?
I saw an article on Ars Technica yesterday that made me have to put my phone down for a second and focus on the breath. Apparently, Sam wants us to know that if we don’t give him absolutely everything that he wants all the time forever, China will just take it all anyway, and then we’ll be defeated in the AI wars. This is all part of a “freedom-focused” set of recommendations that call upon regulators to protect “democratic AI” and its “freedom to learn.” They’re asking for “federal ‘relief’ and ‘liability protections’ from state laws.” They hate the government until they think they can get reliable access to its titty. That article made me dumber; I think I have a concussion.
Gonna jump on Rivals with #Fridabe, Gabe, and Kara until noon or so and then it’s right back into Indiana Jones at noon. Come hang!
(CW)TB
