It’s not about demonizing, it’s about bringing it under control. Silicon Valley behemoths cooperate with the US government in a way that TikTok does not.
During the pandemic there were very similar claims about the massive growth in wealth of the top 1%, where the graph conveniently started at the bottom of the 2020 stock market crash. See also: graphs that compare deaths from terrorist attacks vs. other causes, which start in 2002.
Unlike other professions, academics rarely face consequences for being wrong. A doctor who makes a bad diagnosis risks malpractice, a civil engineer risks their license, and so on.
Academics only really need to worry about the perception of their work by other academics, which isn't inherently tied to results (a notable exception is the hard sciences, which are conceptually much closer to industry).
Businesses and the free market are not an inherent good; they exist for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
Gambling companies, drug dealers, and scammers share a business model that is only profitable when preying on the vulnerable (and causing more suffering in the world), yet they hide behind the excuse that it’s up to the individual to self-regulate.
The people that can self-regulate are not their target audience! Their “tactics” are engineered to take advantage of the vulnerable, and not your average person. And they get away with it because of the American self-centered individualist mindset.
Wow! Just discovered the Spotlight customization and it is so much faster and more useful when you remove certain locations and turn off definitions and Siri suggestions.
It'd be great to expose shady business, but somebody has to enforce the forced transparency and that's a LOT of power. Whoever has that power can pretty easily keep privacy for themselves and their friends, use it to blackmail others, and enforce it more harshly on their enemies.
My point is that no matter what society you look at, the privileged get the nice things (like privacy) automatically whereas the underprivileged have to get it encoded into law, and even then it's not guaranteed. It's a rigged game, and the right to privacy levels the playing field.
When humans were nomads, we didn't have human rights so the point is kind of moot, but we still had secrets (even if gossip made it harder to keep them secret) and we still had a strong social hierarchy with privileged elders.
The point of human rights is to protect the underprivileged - the privileged of any given society don’t need to have these protections because they are at the top of the social hierarchy and get to call the shots. They would simply use their influence to get an exception for themselves. That’s why the US constitution is great, because it’s such a pain in the ass to change (unfortunately the privileged invent “interpretations” to change it retroactively).
Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.
If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is. From what I've seen, developers love building places like Mission Bay in SF and Seaport in Boston, made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies. If that's the vision of our utopian future, count me out.
In a community like HN, where most people work on making rocks think, it’s no surprise when most people start applying the logic backwards: that since we think, we can be no more complex than rocks.
Let’s not forget that society is also out to kill you and utilize you. HN commenters are near the top of the food chain, while exploited third-world workers and oppressed groups are at the bottom.
There will certainly be a lot of money to be had selling products and ideologies to the mass consumer via cheap mass-generated hyper-targeted content. That's not too far of a leap from Marvel/Star Wars where 'The Customer Is Always Right' and creative control is made by committees and focus groups.
But real art can survive. Just like art adjusted to photography or music adjusted to recordings, artists will find a way. In the scenario where current art is truly indistinguishable from AI-generated art, artists of the future could e.g. choose in-person forms of artistic expression which exclude AI by design, like live music, live painting, live storytelling, improv, etc.
Yes, they are different, but it’s extremely easy to conflate them if the skepticism is contrary to the interests of the powerful and you hold the power to censor.
Hence the recent crackdown on “misinformation”. Skepticism and dissent can’t be prevented, but its spread can be suppressed. Many otherwise good people have fallen hook line and sinker for the “misinformation pandemic” propaganda campaign.
"We" didn't kill anybody, they died of a highly transmissible and novel disease for which there was no cure and no vaccine for over a year. There was no possible way that death could have been completely averted. Yes, there were policy choices that could have been made differently, that would have potentially slowed the spread. We implemented many, decided not to implement others, and had a difficult time enforcing the policies we did enact. But using the language of murder when talking this, and arguing using an implied base rate of zero, is hardly good faith.