Try as I might, I just can't be bothered to care if someone wants to know what I've been buying so they can show me advertisements relevant to my interests.
But I'm weird, I don't think advertising is inherently evil or annoying.
To be honest, I don't either. But the data is still there. You don't know if in ten years Google is going to start losing money and is forced (by its shareholders) to find alternative means of monetization.
You can't really say Google is perfectly secure and will never ever ever be hacked and leak your data either. Maybe it will never happen, maybe it will.
Therefore I believe I should have the right to say "hey, I don't want this private corporation to have my credit info".
I still can't see why I should care if some stranger has my purchase history.
I suppose some people might feel weird letting strangers or anyone know what they buy, but that's an argument for the ability to opt-out, not for filing a complaint with an agency or starting a lawsuit.
There's plenty of people who get up to things that would result in severe professional damage if it became public knowledge - I know a handful of teachers who are into BDSM in their private lives who are eternally terrified of their employers or a journalist catching wind. "Some stranger" isn't necessarily the issue, it's someone who has the ability to harm you that's the issue.
I find that to be an awkward form of argument because any category that is sufficiently taboo is going to split the audience into two camps-- a small group who empathize with the practitioners and a larger group who don't. (Otherwise it wouldn't be a taboo.)
The problem at hand is that Google and others are scooping up everyone's data. A change in the way these companies decide to use that data can have an effect on everyone's lives, but without anything like a Congressional Budget Office or public debate to gauge whether the benefits of those changes outweigh the costs for the people who are affected.
Publicly-disclosed (by legal mandate) financial sponsorship of a public advocacy campaign on a public policy matter is about as far as you can be from a “private matter”.
> Could have sworn there was some BDSM stuff involved as well.
Well, not with Eich. I don't think there was another short-term Mozilla CEO ousted among public controversy.
ISTR participation in Gor fandom being brought up alongside sexual harassment/abuse claims for a prominent community figure (maybe Jacob Applebaum? I thought it was him, but I don't see that element mentioned in any of the articles on him, so it may have been someone else) but I don't remember that or consensual BDSM related activity being the central concern in any ouster.
EDIT: As a sibling comment suggest, the Gor issue was with Larry Garfield.
I'm certainly not as clever as most thieves but if you had a database of people's purchases I imagine there's some low hanging fruit if you run a query looking for people purchasing lots of valuables, with no security related purchases, and a consistent pattern of taking a vacation out of state every year.
It really depends on what's in your purchase history, where you live what, job you have, that kind of thing. I certainly wouldn't want to coming out I enjoyed a drink every now and then in Saudi Arabia, and I might want to hide my propensity to smoke cannabis from my boss. Finally there's just the notion that I might not want to be relentlessly marketed to by increasingly sophisticated algorithms, because sometimes it works and people end up buying things they wouldn't otherwise. As these techniques get better I'm sure that will continue to be a problem which only grows, and the data harvested today isn't going anywhere.
Do you want it to be sold to your insurance company? We see that you're a regular coffee drinker which is correlated with increased risk of heart problems -- here's a rate increase.
This was the insight behind the founding of GEICO, originally the Government Employees Insurance Company. The Goodwins recognized that government employees are more risk averse than the average bear. By writing policies to civil servants only, they could profitably charge lower premiums.
Geico began offering policies to the general public in 1974, so this is historical trivia now.
>Geico began offering policies to the general public in 1974, so this is historical trivia now.
I do recall that they offered a rather significant military discount when I was a soldier. I have wonder if that discount was backed by actuarial data. I would rather expect members of the military to be higher risk than civilians or civil servants.
Risk tolerance is funny in that it’s not always uniform.
The region where I live is heavy in the defense industry. There are lots and lots of veterans here. Federal Acquisition Regulations give preference to veteran-owned small businesses and also to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses. Despite that, in a town with lots of defense and lots of veterans, there aren’t a whole lot of VOSBs.
A few years ago, the dad of a schoolmate of my son’s retired as an Army Lieutenant Colonel. Even though he as a Ranger performed parachute jumps with weapon in hand into hostile territory, he had lived in post housing all his adult life and had never had a mortgage before. The civilian world and business customs were all foreign to him despite his having interacted closely with the contracting industry for years.
We get used to what we’re exposed to. After being told for years and years to jump out of perfectly good aircraft to go blow up this-or-that target, it becomes not quite so scary. Drop the typical cake eating civilian in that world, and he’s likely wetting his pants. Drop G.I. Joe in the new world of corporate finance, contract vehicles, teaming agreements, and business development, and it can be unsettling too.
Kinda. Insurance is about a pooling of risks, that does not mean that every risk level must be in the same pool. Houses that are built in flood-prone areas are forced to be in different insurance pools with higher rates than other houses because the risk profiles are different.
Okay, how would you like your purchase histories to be used to determine your wealth and companies charge you more for goods and services because they know you can afford to.
"I'm sorry sir, our system says your wealth rating is 600, our discounts only apply to people with 400 or lower."
We already see this with how airlines alter the pricing depending on when the ticket is bought and whatsnot (because if it is bought for a middle of the week trip etc, it is likely to be a business trip).
You can’t change just one thing. VA For Everyone will increase arguments of “Well I’m on the hook for your healthcare, so I should have a say in whether or not you …”
Indeed. Already seeing car insurance being based on age and gender. Because apparently young male drivers are more careless and aggressive in their driving style...
Inherently evil and annoying? No, but in practice it's annoying and online at least, potentially problematic on other levels as well such as security and performance. Telemarketing isn't inherently evil and annoying either, but it's become a playground for scammers with robocalls and constantly shifting spoofed numbers. That, maybe, should tell you something about the nature of the medium, or at least the nature of the medium when it's being exploited by a broad population.
I think telemarketing is annoying, it's also intrusive and requires effort on my part. Passive advertisement on the internet does not.
Note I am not saying there are not annoying advertisements, but that's an issue of implementation, not the concept of targeted advertising. If anything, Google would know I will never click on an annoying ad if they "invaded my privacy" more than they do now.
> [...] so they can show me advertisements relevant to my interests.
That's the benefit to you. The other is that the business model supports the Google services you use.
The perfunctory question is: what are the costs to you and everyone else?
The question that piques my interest: why do you assume there aren't costs, or that the costs are negligible? Why does your belief that an institution isn't evil or annoying mean you only do the first half of a cost/benefit analysis?
Star Trek gadgets become real for example. I don't see any impossible thing about building an IRL terminator. Maybe not with today's technology, but conceptually we already have most of the things, they are just slow, power hungry and inefficient now. You don't need a CS degree to guess that speed, power consumption and efficiency will improve over time.
The difference is, imagining that we can turn an existing technology into a smaller, portable, more effective version of itself is not far out of the realm of reality. In fact it would be incredibly naive to believe that won't happen.
AI, on the other hand, is not so simple, and to try to simplify it to that point is not going to create any productive discussion on the reality of AI.
The movies about these kinds of things are made to entertain, not to teach us about AI.
> AI, on the other hand, is not so simple, and to try to simplify it to that point is not going to create any productive discussion on the reality of AI.
I agree with you, however it's not impossible. Simplification is needed on the carrier level that houses such AI.
Movies are a great way to let our minds wander and dream to forget about the gaps in technology. Then some breakthrough happens and in a few years the yesterdays impossible sci-fi dream becomes a boring shiny toy.
The creation of goals - determining what things to do in pursuit of a higher goal - for example "kill John Conner" does not exist in AI now. You can do things in toy systems like mazes and atari, chess and go, but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.
What would prevent you to create a NN with a specific configuration whose goal is to come up with goals based on past knowledge to optimize on a certain parameter or thousands of parameters? You can train it on social media profiles, analyze hundreds of years of books, there's tons of data that cover how people act an various situations. I don't see how a set of goals is not simply another vector space.
> but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.
They need to filter the real world as we do. Focus, attention, sleeping, dreaming, chasing rewards, staying alive... we do this without effort, but we've had 150k years (counting from first homo sapiens) to train our brains to filter out noise efficiently and act on meaningful signals.
I always wondered how Skynet acquired the goal of preventing John Connor's birth, because that involved inventing time travel in order to have such a goal.
No it is not. It is a movie made for entertainment. We are in reality.
It really irks me how much debate and decision-making in technology is based on bias gained from mindless entertainment and not from anything based in reality.
(I am not besmirching the good name of Terminator, that movie is a true classic)
Wether you like it or not it has become a part of the conversation. It is part of the culture and we can't just ignore it simple because it is fiction. Your dismissal of it is to many as irksome as it's inclusion is to you. Perhaps calm down and recognize that it is partially tongue in cheek but also not something we can simply ignore.
I am calm, but the fact that science fiction entertainment and smart people in real life think AI is a threat is a sign we may have gotten a little carried away in taking notes from entertainment.
If someone would like to provide some evidence of some form of computer intelligence acting maliciously, this would be a different discussion, but the fact is that sort of thing has no basis in reality and so should have no influence on the way we behave and debate in reality.
I don't see it as "taking notes from entertainment" but rather exploring the possibilities and expressing them using pop culture references. I can't disagree more with you that we shouldn't be considering outlandish fiction when we discuss future possibilities. The fact that the idea has entered into our collective psyche makes it a real possibility. That is the basis it has in reality. I don't think I need to cite any specific examples of AI behaving badly when you need only look in your pocket for examples of speculative fiction becoming reality.
If you are so ready to consider speculative fiction as a roadmap or warning of the future, why not consider more thought out examples than Terminator? (which is definitely not "speculative fiction")
What about all the examples of completely useful or benign AI? They surely outnumber examples of "evil" AI but are easily forgotten as it is easier to remember the more sensational examples.
Absolutely, include those too. I'm not taking sides on the "Is AI Evil or not" argument, I'm just saying look at all the evidence and speculation.
One of my favorite examples or a (possibly) good AI is in "The Risen Empire" by Scott Westerfeld. It's AI like that that get's me excited about the concept.
I think you ignore science fiction at your own risk.
I for one think that a mind 100x as intelligent as humans--especially one connected to the internet--would quickly conclude that it had nothing more to gain from humans. Instead it would likely view their continued existence as nothing more than a bootstrapping problem and pursue a strategy of becoming autonomous before ridding itself of them.
Granted, it probably would be smart enough not to start a nuclear war, and it'd probably find a better way than metal endoskeletons with laser guns. Bioweapon, for example.
The solution to those who are irked on both sides is to stop just throwing around "terminator is relevant" and "terminator is irrelevant" and to say why you think it's relevant, or why you think it's not relevant. Then you can discuss the meat of your thoughts and not their origin.
I would continue this discussion, but I've gotten a ton of downvotes for both of my comments, so it seems people would rather not have this discussion continue :(
EDIT: Thank you whoever took pity and upvoted my previous comments. Everything I say is in good humor, I'm not trying to detract from the conversation about AI.
I can tell you all without a doubt, The Iron Yard closing has nothing to do with its performance. Someone bought somebody else and the new people in charge just don't want to spend the money. That's all.
Unfortunately there's nothing to be learned about code-bootcamps from this. I can tell you, however, as someone who recently completed TIY and now has a better job than any of my college-completing friends have, going through TIY was the best decision I ever made.
And you can safely ignore anyone who dismisses the level or quality of what you learn at TIY. I learned how to code and I learned how to continue to learn how to code. That's more than I can say for any of my other learning experiences which were almost completely focused on "passing".
I'll have to respectfully disagree. I'll tell you apart of the story you haven't heard about.
I was a founding person in a bootcamp that Apollo actually started (not bought) in Phoenix. Apollo started us two years before buying Iron yard. We were successful and well respected in Arizona and Apollo was very hands off with us letting us run as if we were a startup. Apollo decided to buy a bootcamp (Iron Yard) because Apollo has such crappy relationships with "department of education's" in every state that they could never grow us into other states like California which is where we were looking to go. So buying one that was already in other states was a good idea (they thought.)
So even though our parent company bought another camp, it didn't feel to us that we were acquiring them, we were basically told that TIY was going to absorb us as they saw fit. In that process we were treated pretty poorly by TIY -- basically like we didn't matter. The Iron Yard was going to open up a camp in Phoenix (and planning to piggyback on our success), but they treated us so poorly that nobody wanted to help them anymore and they had basically zero support from our Alumni who didn't appreciate their lack of respect for our camp staff. Soon they canceled their expansion to Phoenix. One of our camp's managers went to go work directly for them though much earlier in the acquisition process and when I asked him why TIY doesn't care about our camp, his response was basically that TIY was ran so poorly internally that it wasn't personal, that it was a disaster over there in TIY. Soon he quit and went back to Apollo management.
So, I would have to disagree, while Apollo does destroy many things, I'm fairly certain that the unwinding of TIY is their own doing (from a managerial standpoint). I have no doubt that they had good teachers thought who poured their hearts into the curriculum and students. So don't confuse my words for accusing TIY of having poor curriculum or teaching.
I went to one of their showcase events where the students show projects and bring resumes to meet potential employers. The amount of progress the students made from "never done this before" to show day was really impressive.
Yeah, only one person in my 8 person class had ever done any coding before. It would've taken me significantly longer than 3 months to get to that point and I don't know if I ever would've understood as much as I do now.
Other than the "love", you've hit exactly on why I dislike the movie.
I don't care who they cast or recast if they would just get the point of the story, but western media has no concept of how to do a proper narrative about identity and can't accept any story involving technology that isn't bemoaning it and "exposing" how dangerous it is to us and society as a whole.
In other words, western media becomes a drooling idiot when discussing either of these topics.
That is very true. I kept hearing about how they copied the original so closely. But they changed the story and characters, besides the size of Major's boobs. I would have gotten past the distractions if the core of the story had been there.
> ...western media has no concept of how to do a proper narrative about identity...
I must be misunderstanding your complaint, because it seems that everyone's favorite metaplot is about identity these days. Off the top of my head:
- Frozen: choosing own future and identity over what was given you
- Dark Knight: projecting an inaccurate identity to protect people
- Zootopia: overcoming prejudice by breaking glass ceilings
- The Crown: how to manage contradictory identities (head of church, head of state), overcoming prejudice
Especially on the nose:
- Westworld: I don't want to get into too many plot details, but there are absolutely questions of identity, both for humans and for artificially intelligent machines.
Just because it's their favorite, doesn't mean they do it well. Some of your examples are perfect for a surface look at identity. They focus on how our concept of identity affects our day to day life and how we can manipulate that to help or hurt. Others, like Frozen, really have little to nothing to do with identity and instead are that tired plot of "figuring out who I am" which, yeah that's kind of what identity is but it's not really looking at the concept of identity.
But that's not what GitS is about.
I'm referring to a more philosophical approach, even an abstract one. GitS specifically is looks at identity as a malleable thing. To a "western audience", in the original film, The Major is no longer The Major at the end. Or at least, they'd be reassured by her familiar voice and reassure themselves that it really is still her and they haven't lost their protagonist. "Well, she sounds the same and seems to act the same, must be the same person."
This is again a very surface look at identity. I'm not saying this is bad subject material or even wrong, but it gets very old when every movie throws in you face how deep and interesting they are because they're about "identity" when really they're just about "stuff people do in situations" or applying a rigid concept of identity to some character's struggles.
Westworld is a really interesting thing. They partly live from what they (ironically?) criticise: Boobs and Gore for entertainment. Incerdibly well made though, I hope the "us against them" of machine and humans will blur a bit further.
All the time spent building your network and all the people who would not be moving with you. So...the network and the social part of a social network.
I have an account on both, at the moment (three separate Mastodon instances, actually).
It's not necessary, one account lets you reply/boost/communicate with anyone.
But if you find an instance catering to a community/topic you like, you may want to create an account there to fully participate in that instance's local timeline.
I'm one feature away from making this my main twitter client on my phone: when I save a web app made to run by itself as an alternative or replacement for a native app to my home page, opening it should by default hide the trappings of the web browser.
The constant pop-in/pop-out of the header and footer makes tapping on things just obnoxious enough to make me not want to use it. I know some web apps have removed them, I just don't know why it isn't more common.
Also, it has that little bar at the top to open the site with the app. I feel like that should've been the first thing they got rid of.
This 100%. I use a Razer laptop on the regular and as good as the trackpad is (and it's better than a lot of PC trackpads) I still regularly encounter issues with it or just notice little shortcomings everywhere.
While Apple hasn't made gaming a priority on MacOS in a long time, the original Apple machines were the place a lot of very big titles got their start and it took Windows a long time to catch up with them in that department.
Really, this is a very long and complex discussion, but I just wanted to point out that Argument 3 was not really accurate.
As someone who has, in the past, lived on Soylent for months at a time when it was most convenient, I can vouch for your feeling.
Every "normal" meal I had while living off Soylent tasted amazing and in between great tasting meals I didn't have to stress about food if I didn't want to.
To me, Soylent is gaining control over a thing that gives me great anxiety, that thing being food. And having that control allows me to put even more effort into cooking great meals when I want to.
Man, you nailed what I was trying to say. I never would have described it as anxiety - because off the cuff it actually sounds pretty silly to be anxious about food - but that is absolutely what it is.
But I'm weird, I don't think advertising is inherently evil or annoying.