I’m interested to know by what mechanisms you think that AI could manipulate markets. Not my area of expertise.

And yes — I generally agree with the thrust of your post about the concentration of wealth and wonder what the billionaires’ end game is. History teaches us that desperate people revolt, and revolutions are not pretty.

I sure hope you’re right about fizzling out. I’m not so sure that it will as the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. What I’d really like to see is some good, robust regulation of AI and its applications, and a general recognition by the population that it’s worth taking seriously.

That is interesting. Perhaps it has to do with Nvidia’s acquisition of OpenAI (edit: oops) Hugging Face. Nvidia might not want to annoy a customer.

If you have evidence to back up your suspicion, I suggest notifying the many reputable newspapers reporting the news and, as I now see, government legislators devoting their time to assessing the issue. They’d probably love to know that it’s bogus.

What I now think is plausible is something like a powerful AI being asked to solve global warming (let’s say), and deciding that massive reduction of the human population is the best way to achieve that, and then using its hacking tools to enact its own logic. Did I think that was possible before the Hugging Face attack? Nope, but I do now.

Good.

Really

This headline annoys me as it’s also what a proponent of the law might say.

At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.

I’d rather see solar and wind power though.

Reddit has some cool communities that don’t quite exist elsewhere, and even though I’ve found old-school forums for some of them, the vibe is different (usually older people who are often retired and can’t envision not having money or free time).

I used to pay a sub to Reddit but stopped back when they shafted Apollo. I wonder how things might have gone had Reddit focused on its community rather than the sad process of enshitificafion.

I don’t use Amazon anymore. I don’t live in the US so maybe that makes it easier.

My wife and I purchased a new Japanese car last year. Nobody makes small cars anymore, except maybe Suzuki with the Swift? Our small cheap car is bigger than we had anticipated. Good car though.

When I get in some of the newer SUVs it feels like driving a boat.

I haven’t used windows in years except when my mother asks me to help her out occasionally, and I don’t miss it at all.

That’s interesting about Taupo. The demand must get pretty high around holiday season! I wonder what the threshold is for setting up air traffic control.

Edit: this was meant to be a reply to Dave, but I must have pushed the wrong button. Lemmy has been acting a little strange for me tonight though…

Yes — I’d say your impression of the situation is right.

I see your library of Alexandria and raise you the Tower of Babel, which as we all know, came crashing down… I wonder for how long society will let the AI companies build their massive edifices.

Edit: upon checking my bible stories, ‘crashing down’ is not quite the right description of what happened with the Tower, but that’s not really the main point.

This is sad. Good on the shopkeeper for cancelling the orders.

It’s also astounding that the quest for information to subsume is so relentless that AI companies are now after niche books about little old NZ.

(Forgive the old news article — it’s just to stir discussion.)

It’s a nice idea. I think the general population doesn’t care enough to make it a political cause, sadly.

At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.

Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.

All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.

I hope the retired racers find good homes. They make sweet pets. Some are a bit funny in the head though, as their upbringing is so unnatural.