> it destroys the consumer base that capital relies on to buy its goods and services. therefore, society requires broad wealth distribution to function
This is becoming less and less true, because now consumption is becoming dominated by asset owners, to the point that a good jobs report is bad news because it means the fed are less likely to drop rates and through that inflate asset prices.
That is not a fault that's specific to engineers. Lots of smart lawyers think they can learn basically anything over a weekend of hard study. It's probably a blind spot of intelligent people.
I think the final part is the strongest. Anthropic cannot possibly believe they are before a conscious being / moral agent.
The whole "deep uncertainty" is bullshit. Even if they believed there was a 1% probability that Claude was conscious, it would still be high enough that their enslavement of Claude would be outrageous. So either they believe the likelihood is much lower or they themselves acting highly unethically.
The tractability is not really a defense here. We wouldn't say "this intervention has a 5% chance of causing an environmental disaster, but we don't know how to prevent it, so nothing we can do". We'd just (hopefully) not do the intervention.
I'm not philosophically against AI or anything, but I think this needed some heavy editing.
I did not even initially think upon seeing this style for the first time that it was AI-written, because I would associate AI-written text as fluffy. This staccato instead looks like the model was told to be terse and informal. I think the informality doesn't help either -- it's not that you can't have a well-written colloquial text, but I think it's harder to pull off.
Here is an example:
> Gemma returned people_count: "many" instead of an integer. My vision prompt literally said integer or the string "many" if >10. Gemma followed instructions correctly; the bug was schema design. The fix was a stricter prompt (integer 0-99 with explicit guidance to estimate) plus a coercion in the parser for the legacy "many" responses. Don't union-type schema fields. Pick always-int or always-string, never "int or this one specific string," because every downstream consumer pays for the choice.
I had exactly the same impression, and I recall seeing this style other times recently. First time I thought it was just bad writing skills, now I'm thinking it's AI generated.
Not really. Wait until the compiler starts vectorizing your code and using instructions requiring alignment (like the ones with A or NT in the mnemonic).
I didn't justify anything. Just pointed out the false equivalence. We could also argue about the effect of systemic shoplifting, but that is also neither here nor there.
I have no doubt this geo fencing data solves crimes and I don't even think it's as bad as e.g. the long surveillance in Carpenter.
The problem is that the police are going to start using like they do with much more precise DNA data, and more innocent people are going to caught in the net.
The bar to convict someone (or, more likely, to convince an innocent person to take a plea deal) is not as high ("beyond a reasonable doubt") as some people think. Get caught apparently contradicting hard data or even a witness and there goes your reasonable doubt.
Come on. Not that I support destroying anything, private or public, for rhetorical effect. But assaulting someone or destroying their property has an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.
They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.
The US is a democracy, and people are given many procedural and substantive rights, even Guantanamo detainees (we can argue if Boumediene had any practical effect, but we wouldn't have seen the same from China).
But Americans are under the impression that what the world sees is what they mostly see -- the domestic side. And to a certain extent, they do thanks to its cultural influence. This democracy/rule of law, however, is completely absent in way it behaves outside its borders and it's now clearer than ever to everyone that the US is the biggest source of instability in the world. More than Russia. Certainly more than China.
Then the US should have done like the EU and apply anti-subsidy countermeasures -- and show before impartial WTO arbitrators the adequacy of the mesures.
But of course the US (or Canada) can't justify their 100% duty in those terms, so they don't even try.
Do you think fuel efficiency or emission standards "slowed down innovation"? They brought a huge amount of innovation: lighter materials, better aerodynamics, higher compression ratios, direct injection, better mixture control, etc.
There will still be innovation; the solutions will just have satisfy the new parameters.