Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is the industrial revolution. Manufacturing.
As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading.
It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy.
Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower. Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.
It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.
The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge revenue, even huger your profits.
It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that describes who gains what.
Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot. Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.
What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT? These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.
Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where competition between firms is most intense over something that isn't correlated to external value.
Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking. Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their brand.
Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point where the main driver of success, is lawyers.
A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly relevant to external value. The digital industries often start here or reach this point quickly.
Or the European Pirate Party or similar. They have a handful of elected MEPs at any given time.
That is the problem though. That's not very serious politics. If it's a coalition of tech companies, law enforcement and whatnot vs pirates and anarchists... guess who wins?
A normative, liberal movement/coalition that is for digital freedom is not far fetched. It just doesn't exist. That's why we're losing.
Also, MEPs are often elected differently allowing otherwise unlikely or fringe candidates to succeed.
And, parties/people just don't treap. EP seriously. Everyone knows it's a clownshow. Treat it that way. EP can't have more power because clownshow. Cycle.
It's a perfect 19th century steryotype of upper house (Council) and lower house (EP). One is a club. The other is a square. Public square, atm, are a hard place to do anything but show off and fight.
Yes, corruption at national (and subnational) levels is much greater.
EC institutions don't control enough programs, funds or building permits to rival states on this front.
I do think there is "soft" corruption (as OP alludes) in the "EU as a regulatory powerhouse" complex. Lobby-adjacent corruption, like in the US. A lot of that is very dirty money, with foreigns states or industries literally buying a seat at the table. The cleaner end is Google & Apple getting a seat at the table via ireland (and others) who simply have a national interest in giving it to them. The dirtier is Qatar, China or whatnot getting proxied in for political donations, payola, funding of specific nonprofits/etc.
Anyway... that exists. It is (IMO) almost entirely contained at the top level, and it mostly bleeds in from national politics.OTOH, competence and professionalism also exists in the EC. That means the can actually deliver on the job, if they're tasked with a good job.
The EU has very little advocacy or awareness of digital freedom. Foreign ministry staff don't understand it at all. We're just a stream of weirdo complaints that appears whenever they try to do anything digital related. I know it's hard to grok, but they do not have any idea what we are talking about... and that's kind of our fault. Democracy has some essential bottom up components.
On the positive side... a sound, rational and tactical movement can (IMO) really succeed and get stuff. The good thing about eurocrats, is that once they're mission is the right mission... they get it done better than most. EU consumer protection, for example, is quite excellent relative to any examples I know. EU infrastructure and transport projects were executed way better than national equivalents (see Ireland again for examples).
There is no serious political/factional/ideological barrier to EC adopting digital freedom goals. Just ignorance. There's hope.
The EC pushes through controversial decisions, that are not controversial between states... the bar is generally something high in this regard.
National Governments get a buffer between them and discontented citizens, because "it's the EU." There is also a lot of pressure to conform to EC "consensus," parties/individuals that want to be seen as government material.
EC totally discounts digital privacy especially privacy from state actors and there is corruption, carve out a and such. I disagree with a lot of their agreements. I agree that they make far too many laws and are way too bureaucratic but....
EP is a shitshow on another level. It's literally the star wars senate. Endless factions, recreational politics. No about to act in a way that might result in anything but show. It's trump, but boring.
National governments also don't lack in corruption. Politics sucks.
IMO, what is badly missing is an active electorate. Civil society. There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. ATM, EC is taking advice from tech industry,dirty insiders and spooks. No one speaks for "The Cause" because, to paraphrase americans... "When I need to speak to Europe's digital freedom people, who do I call?"
”No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” - Slashdot's famous 2001 dismissal of ipod.
Apple has a history of high prices, and a history of making it work by pioneering forms and user interface paradigms . The desktop GUI everyone now knows as "computers." Laptops. Click wheel ipods, and their multi-device paradigm. All-screen smartphones.
There's no guarantee of success, but VR is exactly the kind of problem where Apple has a legacy of releasing breakthrough products.
Going with apple's history... and 2000 skeptical comments... it all comes down to content. I'm also skeptical about using a heads up display for 2D stuff... like watching regular movies or using a virtual, 2D monitor. That said who knows.
There are things that I would like to see. VR films could be amazing. Design software could be amazing. Simulators.
Regardless of what content, all content faces user base issues. Can't make a $100m Star Wars film for a <1m person audience.
The $3500 price tag might restrict the number of users, and make profitable content difficult. OTOH, pushing for the best device possible might make new kinds of content work.
I don't claim any specific boundaries for the term, but... there are more angles to this than censorship. Spielberg is from perhaps the most commercial art form, cinema. They make Airplane cuts, TV cuts, video cuts. They remaster the score, cut regional releases... These are all commercially oriented "censorship," arguably. Cinema is an art form that's literally pitched to investors and financiers. Purity and absolutes don't exist here.
Meanwhile... Books have come in editions since printing. Before that, stories evolved too. Especially for important or really old texts, we're always interested in "The Original." That tends to be when the history matters to us more than the story. That's somewhat at odds with stories "Living." We have stories today that originated milenia ago in forgotten civilisations. They've been written countless times.
The original Nancy Drew may be an important cultural artefact. But, solving mysteries by racial profiling or otherwise violating "modern sensibilities" makes it a dead story. Revising additions keeps Nancy Drew suitable reading material for 9 year olds, which is what being a living story means here.
Anyway... I'm taking the dissident position. I do like and want the raw, "uncensored" cuts. I want Reservoir Dogs. I want even edgier materials that large, centralised studios
OTOH, I have no hard objection to releasing updated editions that reflect updated morals. The freedom & openness obligation that we have is to keep the original intact and available. Intellectual property tends to be the barrier to this, not censorship.
It's often fine to rewrite, recut. In fact, it can keep art alive. Guns and Roses pulled a track from an old album, because it had bigoted lyrics. IDK why exactly they "censored" the album, but my guess is that the band doesn't want to sell the album like that anymore... they definitely don't want to play it anymore. Maybe social norms changed. Maybe Axl changed. What seemed edgy and rebellious to 20 year old Axl just seems asshole now.
"Anti-Censorship" is a failing paradigm, currently.
Is moderating HN or a subreddit censorship? Is having a a newsroom editor censorship? IMO it's a lot more about who makes the decision than what they do. If GnR revise an album, IMO it's ridiculous to call it censorship. Same for having moderation on HN, revised editions of children's books etc.
Censorship is a feature of power and monopoly. A subreddit does not have power to "censor," just moderate. Facebook or Twitter's moderation policies are censorious by default. You can't have global-scale, medium-wide content policies that are not censorship.
There aren't really laws/cases that apply to LMs creating derivatives yet. Maybe there will be in the future. Currently, in practice, GPT will digest your blog and incorporate it into itself.
I agree that GPT modernization consulting and such bullshit will emerge. It always does. That's neither here nor there though. It's just noise.
Re: Tesla autopilot. I think this is the more serious. Obviously I'm speculating. It is definitely possible that GPT is one more example of AI doing cool tricks, and convincing us that is it farther advanced than it is.
That said, I don't think this is another Tesla autopilot for two reasons.
Reason one is robotics. Autopilot is robotics and robotics sucks. It's incredibly difficult, frustratingly physical and painfully hard to do the last 20%. The economics is even worse. It's very rare that robotics finds the unit volume necessary to achieve realistic prices. When version 1 is a $10 million dollar replacement for a $50k employee, there's rarely a version 2. It's just very hard to move the ball forward in robotics.
Reason two is that GPT is a solution looking for problems. It's more general. Autopilot has one job: drive the car and do the robotaxi thing. There are few stepping stones. Mistakes can kill people and kill Tesla. It either does the job or doesn't, Elonmagic notwithstanding.
GPT just needs to do something useful, not any particular thing. It can be used in low stakes applications. It can be bolted on to stuff for shots and giggle. Marginal costs are already zero. Basically, it's software. Software spreads faster and easier.
These questions are constant. I do think you bring up relevant issues, but they aren't quite showstoppers.
Websites allow SE crawlers because (a) whatever traffic they get is better than not traffic (b) because allowing crawlers is default and doesn't cost anything and (c) google/bing don't negotiate. They are one, sites are many.
This has already played out in news. News outlets wanted Google to pay for content. Google (initially) responded by allowing them to opt out of Google. Over the years, they have negotiated a little bit. Courts, in some places, forced Google to negotiate... It's news and politicians care about news specifically. Overall though, there have not been meaningful moments where people got pissed off with Google and blocked crawlers. Not newspapers and not anyone else. Site owners being mad doesn't affect google or Bing.
What does matter to search engines is walled gardens. Facebook pioneered this, and this does matter to Google. There is, in a lot of cases, a lot less content to index and serve users. All those old forums, for example.
These are search problems, and GPT-based search will inherit them. ChatGPT will have the same problem recommending the best air fryer as normal search does. GPT is a different way of presenting information... it's not presenting different information.
RE: Lawsuits. Again, history. Youtube, for example, started off with rampant copyright infringement. But, legal systems were primitive. Lawyers and legislatures didn't know what to do. Claimants were extremely dispersed, and would have had to pioneer case law. Ultimately, copyright took >10 years to really apply online and by that point youtube and other social media was entrenched.
The law lags. In practice, early movers are free to operate flawlessly and they get to shut the door after them. Now that Google is firmly entrenched, copyright law serves as one of their trenches.
So.. I must say that GPT, and the current moment more broadly, are very exciting.
People are rushing around trying to find practical uses for ChatGPT. I think this time they'll finally start finding them, probably a lot of them. I think this is one of those dam bursting points. The difference between GPT3 and ChatGPT, to me, suggests a lot.
Writing code, writing documents, reading them... search... lots of things are about to change fast. The conversation leaked by this microsoft mole is happening in a lot of places. If you can't think of things worth trying to build with GPT... you need to take a bath and try again.^ Bonus points if you can get GPT to code it for you.
There are, absolutely, spectres hanging over this stuff. Monopoly, centralisation, nontrasparency is expected. Career anxiety. Skynet is not out of the question. Lots of reasons for trepidation. That said, ATM, I'm mostly excited. This technology is amazing, and it is about to spill out into the world.
^I want a reference book that works as a cascade. A table of contents (or title even) at the top end. Click in for a chapter abstract, then summary, etc. Concise at the top, detailed at the bottom.
In fact, one of Google's advantages of altavista and such was that pagerank diluted the effects of keyword stuffing, the primitive SEO that had degraded primitive websearch. Search, media and advertising is dynamic, cat and mouse stuff... always. I wouldn't be surprised if "Language Model Optimization (TM)" is currently being invented by a drop shipper living under his basement.
Measure something, act on it, and you change the thing. You have to remember that these things have symmetry. The seo is trying to help users get to his site. From their perspective, Google's anti-spam is hostile to that goal. Google is trying to serve search results. To them, SEO is a hostile attempt to prevent that.
Even for cars, "The Market for Lemons" dynamic has never been a major effect. It doesn't define automotive culture. The theory does describe parts of reality in the used car market, but even here... it's not the main thing. A theory like this may be useful for understanding existing phenomenon, but not for prediction... IMO.
Anyway... "SPAM" may be over. That is, I suspect that whatever low end, semi-legal marketing drek produced by GPT-like will not read as "SPAM" to us. Rather, we'll get whole new species of junk marketing, telescams and whatnot.
My prediction is that the first piece of weird will be AI autocomplete. A GPT that takes more context (eg all company emails) built into email & DM clients... that will escalate quickly. The line between human and machine will blurr.
OK... this is the kind of thing I am talking about.
"It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour."
That's one of the reasons, and it's not a bad reason at all. In fact, I would say that wikipedia couldn't buy what it gets for free at any price. It's also for other reasons. Wikipedia serves lightweight websites. It has a lightweight management structure. It has a lightweight content moderation function.
None of these are incidental. They are what efficiency is made of.
In any case, what is your comment demonstrating other that everything can be criticised. By what standard, is wikimedia worthy of your scorn?
I don't disagree with anything you said. I also think that wikipedia should adopt a much less cringey fundraising style.
However...
I feel like wikipedia tends to attract a highly disproportionate amount of criticism, especially about fundraising, budget inflation and editing/deletionism. In one sense, this is a good thing. Criticism and scrutiny keep organisations honest.
In another sense, there's a nihilism to it. Wikipedia is perhaps 100X more resource efficient than a Facebook. It's far more respectful of its users than any bigtech. It embodies otherwise naive ideals of the early web. It has performed way better than commercial peers in the face of the decade's misinformation and political fact wars... including journalistic ones. It keeps its nose much cleaner than big nonprofits like the Red Cross. All freely available to everyone, highly accessible, supported by optional donations. Wikimedia is a beacon.
FOSS has been tamed. The rivers of the WWW have been dammed. "Don't be evil" got fired. It feels like Wikipedia is subjected to a bigotry of higher expectations specifically because it doesn't suck. There's a crabs-in-a-bucket feel to it that disturbs me.
Net neutrality really highlights the ratchet effect that arises wherever a conflict of interest between the general public and special interests exists.
They never stop. Legislative lobbying. Massive Legal efforts. Attempts at influencing the executive/government activities.
As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading.
It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy.
Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower. Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.
It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.
The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge revenue, even huger your profits.
It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that describes who gains what.
Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot. Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.
What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT? These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.
Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where competition between firms is most intense over something that isn't correlated to external value.
Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking. Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their brand.
Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point where the main driver of success, is lawyers.
A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly relevant to external value. The digital industries often start here or reach this point quickly.
Is manufacturing actually the exception?