It's worth remembering "past performance is not indicative of future results."
Don't reason about the safety of potential future technology from the safety of past technology, generally. That gets you into nonsense like "my highly contagious bio-weapon won't destroy civilization because the axe didn't." You've got to look at the particularly characteristics of the new technology, with a cold and realistic understanding of human nature.
> Yes, we know that it is ultimately bad humans pulling the trigger, but we also know for a fact that bad humans exist. So why are we arming them?
Because tech people want to build, are paid to build, and "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
> The technology remains the enabler, the responsible remains the human actor.
That's an awful lot like "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Some tech people just want to keep building, consequences be damned. Mentally shifting the responsibility one step further down the road is just a way for them to dodge responsibility.
It's worth remembering the developer is also "human actor." He's still responsible if he builds a dangerous technology, and leaves it for someone else to push the button.
>> From the article: “Deep learning, which is fundamentally a technique for recognizing patterns, is at its best when all we need are rough-ready results, where stakes are low and perfect results optional“
> It is somewhat embarrassing how many tasks, from customer service to sportswriting to language translation to article summarizing to concept art for films, can be handled by deep learning at its current level of competence.
No, it's embarrassing how eagerly leaders will compromise quality to chase automation cost savings. The things you list, especially customer service and sports-writing, cannot "be handled by deep learning at its current level of competence." That doesn't stop people from forcing the results down our throats, though.
I think he's talking about the Google robot that was linked in the root. "Muzzing" a domestic robot would probably mean putting it in a cage, which would defeat the whole point. That's not a solution.
> I think the remark is more about these sort of rhetorical tactics which permeate every topic. It is a fair remark.
It's not a fair remark though, all it did was twist what I said into a inflammatory derailment.
The point is there are a lot of (usually technical) people who are too focused one aspect, but are missing the bigger picture. If you follow them, you'll probably get a communication app that only those people can/will use, which has deal breakers for mass-market adoption. And once that happens, those people probably won't use it either, since they want to communicate outside their group.
> ... but then Signal wouldn't have your phone number either. What they need it for is ... dubious if you ask me.
The reasons they need it aren't really that dubious to me: they want to create a service that actual people will actually use, not just weird privacy geeks who never gave up on PGP. Using phone numbers allows for the kind of user discovery that most people expect in 2024, and requiring them inserts a barrier to mass account creation that can keep spam accounts down to a manageable level (especially given the whole point is they can't do content-based spam-filtering in the way that makes email managable).
Personally, my understanding is they've always been trying to develop the maximally private usable chat app, which requires some compromises from the theoretically maximally private chat app.
>> What do they want to make "meaningful progress" on? I certainly can't see "journalism for journalism's sake" as a good thing. Seems more likely you will get gatekeeping and another venue for activism?
> In my opinion, "journalism for journalism's sake" would be what we call reporting the truth, or investigative journalism. Is there a national outlet that invests in pure investigative journalism anymore?
Investigative journalism can still amount to "gatekeeping and another venue for activism," if the investigative attention is selective and focused (more or less) to support one or more activist programs.
That's actually the most effective kind of manipulation, because it's simultaneously true and misleading.
And I also think that's close to what we've got. To really be "journalism for journalism's sake," I think you'd have to allocated investigative resources roughly equally among factions, with investigations focused on "pro-narrative" ideas and "counter-narrative" ideas.
> Contributing to Wikipedia has become really not fun. Or maybe it never was. I tried writing an article about Playwright - perhaps the most common test automation tool these days. It first got rejected and now just has been sitting in review state for 3 months.
It only gets worse. Try getting into a content dispute sometime.
> Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby.
You don't even need that. IIRC, the "PROD" process can get an article deleted with no votes at all. All you have to do is tag the article and if no one removes it for a week, it will be deleted with no further discussion.
The caveats are you can only PROD something once, and I believe no discussion is required to delete a PROD'ed article (if anyone remembers it to want to bring it back).
Personally, I don't put Youtube in the social network category because most of its users are passive consumers. I think social networks as systems that explicitly model social connections and whose users have a relatively high ratio of send-actions to receive-actions.
That said, Youtube does have many of the same social problems as Facebook (e.g. use as a cheap and effective channel for pushing disinformation, cultivating hyperpartisan filter bubbles, etc.).
Facebook is only company that operates social networks that deeply penetrate the US population. Google doesn't have any successful social networks. Twitter isn't used heavily by typical people, and neither is Snapchat or Reddit.
> Except those had been going on for years, and now all of a sudden, after Facebook changes their algorithm, journalists notice that Facebook has a problem.
I think the 2016 presidential election has a lot more to do with the increased scrutiny. It brought both the media's direct attention and motivated many insiders to make public criticisms of Facebook, which fuels coverage.
I see these ads in the New York Times app.