This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.
Personally, I’d like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?
We can dream better than this.
Also, not only do they rely on “just vision”, crucially they rely on real-time processing without any memory or persistent mapping.
This, more than anything else is what bewilders me most.
They could map an area, and when observing a construction hazard save that data and share it with other vehicles so they know when route setting or anticipate the object. Not they don’t. If it drives past a hazard and goes around the block it has to figure out how to navigate the hazard again with no familiarity. That’s so foolish.
This is a genuine concern that we should recognize.
I’m about 99% confident it isn’t, but considering it is the kind of caution we should all be exercising these days.
Respectfully, this title gets under my skin.
Why so doomer? He might veto it. It wouldn’t be surprising. But why are you declaring a loss prematurely?
Don’t hope for things there’s no chance of. Fight to change the chances of things, and if you fail try and fight again and again until you win.
This headline reads like 2025 news Mad-Libs:
“[Proper noun] is using [Latest fad] to [Verb] [Ideological alignment adjective] [Conceptual noun]”
Try it:
“OpenAI is using Hydroflasks to destroy Catholic exceptionalism”
“Mark Cuban is using cryptocurrency to monetize white supremacist hope”
Good times./s
Oy. I really don’t want to see what happens when we’re faced with an actual challenge. This is… yikes.
Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!
Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It’s all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy’s Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.
There’s no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it’s been a year since this information came out.
Yo I self host a Nextcloud server and I don’t know what an apk is. Please stop being a gatekeeper. Grandma Ruth deserves alternatives to big tech just like the rest of us.
All freedom to all the people. These tools aren’t supposed to be some special privilege for 1337 hackers. They should be ubiquitous.
The same ones listed in the article. Property ownership, speech, privacy, etc.
I feel like the rise of corporate personhood is the elephant in the room this article seems to avoid acknowledging.
I specifically said I wasn’t.
I’m not prescriptive in the order, but I would imagine they’re most likely to occur in tandem over a period of years.
I find this surprising, because frankly I agree.
I don’t know much about Dorsey, but in Musk’s case, I think this is another case of him espousing a good idea he’d never actually honor.
I think that anyone should be able to make movies with Mickey Mouse and no one should need to license code. But I suspect that like with free expression, these are values most proponents only like when it’s benefiting them.
Also, as for the alternatives to support creatives, I would say start with universal services. Universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education, universal food. We would have so much more art if we recognized that no one should have to “earn” their survival. Once that’s guaranteed – and abolish billionaires and extreme wealth inequality too – I think discussions over how to support creatives would take place from a much more favorable starting point.
Wow!
That’s good world building.
Geez … easy, bro.
We’re not saying you can’t enjoy it, alright! But if you start perving on the violence, don’t think we’re not gonna take notice, okay?
That’s fuckin’ nuts.
Also, this headline is bad. I thought he died. No. He just got a transplant after 100 days (whew).
I’m a materialist, so I think digital consciousness is totally possible. But then I’m also a bit of an animist too, so maybe you’re right.
I agree overall, though. It’s so much more epistimology than actual technology, and the field seems to be half grifters and half cultists. Which doesn’t really inspire confidence that this is in any way a genuinely useful commercial venture.
What is the point, though?
If you made AGI, you’d have a computer that thinks like a person. Okay? We already have minds that think like a person: they’re called people!
I get that there is some belief that if you can make a digital consciousness, you can make a digital super-conciousness, but genuinely stop and ask what the utility is, and it’s equal parts useless and evil.
First, this premise is totally unexamined. Maybe it can think faster or hold more information in mind at one moment, but what basis is there for such a creation actually exceeding the ingenuity of a group of humans working together? What problem is this going to solve? A “cure for cancer”? The bottleneck to cutting cancer isn’t ideas, it’s that cell research takes actual time and money. You need it synthesize molecules and watch cells grow, and pay for lab infrastructure. “Intelligence” isn’t the limiting element!
The primary purpose is just to crater the value of human labor, by replacing human workers with workers with godlike powers of reasoning. Good luck with that. I’m sure they won’t come to the exact reasoning as any exploited worker in 120 nano-seconds.
It’s like Jason’s problem-solving advice in “The Good Place”:
“Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail… Boom, right away, I had a different problem.”
Sure. Let’s work ourselves to death forTHIS.
Yep. Not to gloat, but I never touched Amazon’s ebook marketplace.
My current e-reader is a second-hand Kindle that has a permanent message asking if I would just please connect to a WiFi network just one time just for a moment PLEEEEEASE.
I get my books from libgen, Gutenberg, or Kobo, and keep them on my computer. They’re organized in Calibre, and I transfer them over on a USB cable.
I love buses too, but a van pool is materially different. Buses travel fixed routes. A van pool can act as a shared taxi that shuttles people directly between points of immediate departure, transit stations, and final destinations.