This sounds like pretty dangerous thinking to me. A government financial crisis is something that happens slowly and then very quickly. The US currently enjoys extremely low borrowing rates and still spends a significant portion of its tax receipts servicing debt. If the country starts to appear much less stable and reliable in the long term those rates can increase sharply, which would put gigantic strain on the country's finances, which would cause rates to jump even more. It's a bad cycle that we very much want to avoid.
Even without any disaster scenarios we spend an immense amount of money every year on debt payments. That money could instead be spent on any number of other use cases that actually produce something useful.
> If the country starts to appear much less stable and reliable in the long term those rates can increase sharply,
but its US who decides which rates it uses to borrow from itself.
I see its just some process to do all this inflation thing in US, while I imagine various other countries just print the money causing inflation and don't go through debt ceiling approval voting.
I've never publicly scolded someone for doing free work for tech monopolies but I do understand the impulse. The problem is that it's a completely one-sided relationship, and there are perfectly legitimate concerns about how the biggest tech companies are using their wealth and power. At this point I doubt much of anyone would expect a large tech company to go out of its way to lose money in order to support human communities. They take what they can, and ruthlessly kill products and services the minute they think it helps their bottom line.
Google and others don't need to rely on free volunteers, but it's certainly more profitable for them. Does Google making an extra $10B/year make the world a better place? Maybe, I don't know, but it's not crazy to think the answer is no.
It not a completely one sided relationship. I'm using google maps for free!!! That's HUGE benefit to me. That google makes money from it is irrelevant to me. They're paying me by providing a free service that I get tons of usage out all the time.
Sure, your navigation app needs to know where you are in order to function
Does the company that owns your navigation app have to remember every route you've ever taken forever? Does it need to do meta analysis on your location data to figure out where you likely work and life and where your friend are? Does it need to sell that data to law enforcement and businesses so they can track your movements and pattern match your behaviors?
Seems to me there's a huge gulf between "location app knows where you are" and "we have used that to collect every scrap of information about your movements everywhere you go and weaponized that information against you"
This, I submit photos and corrections to maps all the time, because those photos and corrections help me as well as other people. I derive way more benefit than I personally provide but I'm OK with that and google is too.
I don't have sharp rhetoric for it, but I could find bipartisanship with right-wingers if they apply the "big government giving you welfare means they can take it away from you" to free web services.
OpenStreetMap is always behind on business data, but it has data that Google doesn't have, and it can't be taken away near as easily. And requires no account at all.
You can't demonize Google, in binary fashion, and remain intellectually honest. Economically the big tech relationship is clearly one-sided, but that ignores what the tech companies are actually providing. If we didn't find a need for their products, they wouldn't be streaming billions in revenue. Even before 2017, while deservedly subject to global anti-trust suits, they provided arguably the best and most popular search tool which empowered and connected its literal billions of users. In 2017 Google researchers published "Attention is all you need" for all eyes to read -- without a software patent. This came after a long trajectory of AI investment. This seminal work, more than any other single advance, birthed modern AI, an undeniably powerful and disruptive technology which is largely supplanting Google's search products. While I am supportive of big tech giving back in the form of higher taxation upon their profits, you can't deny the arguably insane research gifts they have bestowed upon all. But you still certainly can ask the question, "is this technology making the world a better place?" as you have suggested.
Many people who provided quality technical content on blogs, Stack Overflow, and other forums thought they were providing a public good and helping to create a lasting culture and community. Turns out they were making fuel pellets to power money machines for the richest tech oligarchs in the world.
Most of these communities are being destroyed before our eyes by AI. Anyone in the industry who pretends this isn't happening, or seems confused about why some people are upset about this, is being highly disingenuous.
I feel the same and find myself extending it beyond forums. I've started skipping over articles about AI more and more from authors I normally enjoy reading because so few of those articles end up being particularly interesting or insightful.
AI is obviously an important topic but it has been discussed to absolute death the past couple years and very few people have anything useful to add at this point. Things will of course evolve and change in the near term but someone speculating that maybe this will happen or that will happen isn't very useful.
Given the risks and unknowns I think we should collectively be treating it as a major risk to our economic and national security, and figuring out how to mitigate the downside risks without stifling the upside. But most of the people in power have zero interest in doing that so we're all going to YOLO this in real time.
They're also the only party of fiscal responsibility, although Biden broke the pattern there. Nearly all deficit reduction over the past couple generations has happened under Democrats.
Even with Biden, the pandemic situation was handled relatively well compared to most of the world. We were due for a "soft landing", and then we voted to instead tax ourselves with tsrriffs and scare off the lion's share of our tourism. Oh, and give tax cuts to billionaires, of course.
What do you think is going to happen to LLM content after it has replaced the rest of the internet? It sure as hell isn't going to stay relatively unbiased and ad-free. The degradation of Google Search is probably an optimistic comparison.
Agreed on all three points, but I think this is pretty obviously terrible in the long run. The open internet was one of the greatest common goods in human history. That ecosystem is quickly being exploited to death by a handful of tech companies. Those companies are generating a lot of revenue in the short term, and the rest of humanity is losing a great deal.
I can't even begin to count how many times I've found interesting and useful information from an old forum/article/guide that was supported by some ads or simply an avenue to engage with people. Those incentives are now gone.
Tech companies have no ethics and their leaders think it's in their interest to continue the exploitation, so that's what is going to happen. The only effective way to prevent a tragedy of the commons situation on this scale is major government action and there is zero political will for that at this time.
In the long run there will be some sort of reaction, maybe site curation will make a comeback. A few big name sites will probably resist the slop and survive as an institution. But the internet many of us know and love is being pummeled to death before our eyes.
I didn't know there was a type of bird called a shrike until long after I read Hyperion. The birds look and sound like cute little songbirds, kind of like a smaller mockingbird. But the way they hunt is hardcore. They capture small prey (lizards, grasshoppers, etc) and impale them on a spike from cactus or a broken branch. Then they return to eat them at their leisure.
It's rare to see their caches but a few times I've been out hiking in the desert and seen the remains of a little critter on a cactus thorn.
Even without any disaster scenarios we spend an immense amount of money every year on debt payments. That money could instead be spent on any number of other use cases that actually produce something useful.
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