> Myself and the OP are more worried about the other path: a dystopia in which the majority of people are forced into something much worse than wage slavery by those in control of the thinking machines.
My fear is that nobody will remain in control of the thinking machines. Imagine an AI agent for hire which maintains its own cryptocurrency accounts and pays its own cloud hosting bills. That's the future I'm worried about.
My cynical prediction: Google search (as we now know it) will be retired. Google will provide AI-generated text which attempts to answer the user's prompt, with links to results in a handful of curated sources such as wikipedia.
My argument is that opposition to gay marriage isn't intrinsically hateful. The ancient Greeks had no notion of gay marriage, for example, and they weren't exactly averse to gay sex or to men who enjoyed it.
Your system of values, beliefs, and definitions may create a tunnel vision which makes it look like opposing views can only be motivated by hatred or bigotry. But the reality is, other people have different views because they hold different values, beliefs, and definitions. If you cared more about the preservation of traditional culture, and not so much about the peculiar way that homosexuality is expressed in modern western societies, then your views would presumably be in line with those of Eich.
I've never understood what exactly the "open" in OpenAI is supposed to imply. They produce proprietary, gated models - not open in any meaningful sense.
> Desktop Linux is more complex, more fragile, and more choice-less than 10-15 years ago.
More complex, sure. Bare ALSA was simpler than Pulse/PipeWire. But the benefit of the additional complexity is that nowadays, sound just works. PipeWire gives us flexible audio routing pipelines like Jack, but for all audio applications rather than just pro audio! And as a counter-example, the X11 to Wayland transition considerably reduces the complexity of the display stack.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with "more fragile", but I definitely disagree with more choice-less. Sure, I wouldn't want to run modern Gnome on a full-size desktop/laptop (we have MATE, Xfce, and countless minimal WMs/compositors for that). But modern Gnome is great on tablets. Non-systemd and non-glibc distros are out there if you're into that sort of thing. Flatpak, etc are available if you're into that - if not, nobody's forcing you to use them.
> But can you actually use them as a phone?
Yes, with effort and some sacrifices. The velocity is in the right direction - the situation is much better than it was a year or two ago.
> Without that, they'll also never get the things that people want their phones to do.
I agree that there needs to be a sufficiently large community that things get developed. But this doesn't mean we need billions (or even millions) of users.
Didn't work on the desktop? I've been running Linux exclusively on my desktops for 15 years. Desktop Linux is better today than it's ever been.
Why does every OS need to be suitable for average consumers? Librem and Pine64 are doing great work in the mobile Linux space on the hardware side, and projects like PostmarketOS are doing great work on the software side. These are niche products for motivated enthusiasts, as they should be. They'll never grow to billions of users, nor should they. The tech industry's "grow massive or the product is worthless" mindset is pathological, in my opinion.
Counter-argument: DALL-E is smart enough to understand that an astronaut riding a horse makes more sense than a horse riding an astronaut, and therefore assumes that you meant "a horse-riding astronaut" unless you go out of your way to specify that you definitely do, in fact, want to see a horse riding an astronaut.
> I think we were close. We got general purpose computers and we had a robust open source movement.
Why do you say we "had" a robust open source movement? As far as I can see, FOSS is as strong as it's ever been. The Linux desktop experience is nicer than it's ever been before. If you're adventurous, you can even run mainline Linux on your phone nowadays.
Sure, the incentives suck. Ad-tech and other garbage makes much more money, and all that junk has grown proportionately with its profitability. But FOSS hasn't gone anywhere.
> Yes. I received a request to build a social credit score solution based on credit card purchases for rewarding ESG-type behavior.
Hmm, I'd be interested to hear more. I thought ESG was a metric by which investors and funds judge companies/industries, but it sounds like this system was intended to judge individual consumers? For what purpose?
It seems that different people have vastly different use cases for phones.
I don't use any of those apps, and if I did, I'd prefer a larger screen and physical keyboard. My phone is for calling, SMS, navigation, and notifying me of new emails (never for actually replying though!).
My understanding is that polyethylene is one of the most benign plastics with respect to leaching, and that PEX should be even more benign than normal polyethylene because of the crosslinking.
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" really should be required reading for all high school students. Personally, I re-read it every few years - chronic exposure to terrible English makes the bad habits grow back, so you need to pull the weeds regularly.
> my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people
My layman interpretation of this fact is that consciousness/sentience doesn't originate in the cerebral cortex, but rather, within deeper brain structures.
I think you've missed the big one, which is contextualization. Outlets A and B might both publish the same quote from the same source making some claim. But outlet A might contextualize it by talking about his degrees, credentials, and experience, without mentioning that he's a pariah in his field. Outlet B might contextualize it by ignoring his credentials entirely and going to great lengths to emphasize that he's a pariah in his field. Readers will come to very different conclusions depending on which contextualization they see.
My fear is that nobody will remain in control of the thinking machines. Imagine an AI agent for hire which maintains its own cryptocurrency accounts and pays its own cloud hosting bills. That's the future I'm worried about.