this perpetual aspect is their achilles heel
it is only a matter of time before an organization realizes they don't HAVE to do a SaaS product to make a billion dollars. but for now, everyone's trying to make a hundred billion dollars and are steered into doing things that enthusiasts hate.
Most people recognize this. But venture backed startups (especially important for AI companies with high training costs) need to prove stickiness and reoccurring revenue to the investors. Conveniently a subscription proves both.
Subscribe and SaaS are just good for businesses (and tbh many purchasers of tech). I think it’s here to stay.
In a non-competitive market with uninformed customers.
Honestly, I have no idea how long that situation can last. Probably more than I can imagine, so yes, it's good business.
I genuinely fear that the breakdown of millennia old social structures that kept us human might lead to a temporary (century long) turmoil for individuals. The answers to the 'meaning of life' and 'what makes us human' are going to change. And we will never be the same again.
This isn't just about AI. External wombs, autonomous robots, genetic editing & widespread plastic surgery each fundamentally destroy individual aspects of 'what makes us human' or 'the meaning of life'.
Might be for the best. But such drastic change is really hard for the fragile human brain to process.
> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows. - Plato, in Phaedrus, ca. 370 BC
While our replacements for parts of ourselves have gotten far more advanced, the fact of the matter is that we haven't stopped being human simply because we can make tools that remember things for us, build things for us, or let us change parts of ourselves more easily.
This is because what makes something human is not our body--an argument that Diogenes famously refuted in about the same era--nor is it merely our minds, though our minds are pretty impressive. What makes us human--what makes us alive, in a sense beyond merely being an animal that isn't dead yet--is what we do with those things. I could grow fox ears and a fluffy tail in the world of tomorrow; I could use an AI to remind myself to self-care; today I already benefit from a thousand different kinds of mass-produced products. But none of that makes me a different person, because I'll still be doing things with my life that meant something to me yesterday--because those things will continue meaning something to me tomorrow.
That argument has been made since only slightly later. The key difference is that this truly is a unique time in history by population numbers. It's also unique in that humans could destroy the biosphere if we wanted to - that was never possible before the mid-20th.
Just because people jumped the gun in the past doesn't mean they are wrong now. The truth is that people are always preaching about the apocalypse, and will continue to do so as long as there are humans, I think. But this does not mean an apocalypse isn't coming. Just like the person who always predicts rain is sometimes right.
It's not possible now either. If all of humanity's efforts were devoted to this task, they would not even make a noticeable difference.
There would still be life of the smaller sort, and deep in the oceans of course. Only a terribly unlucky cosmic event, like a nearby supernova spewing enough neutrinos at us could kill literally all life, even in the cracks and crevices.
(And temperate forests "burn down" all the time as part of their normal operations.)
But you can't define the biosphere as "the species that go extinct in a particular scenario". You're stuck with the whole thing, which is not going to notice whatever humans do. It would make as much sense to call it "destruction of the biosphere" if I moved a rock thirty feet.
Yes, please!
[1] "Diverse Intelligence" - a talk by Michael Levin, timestamp: induce cells to make an eye anywhere, https://youtu.be/iIQX6m2eRPY?t=2939
The obesity epidemic (Gluttony ) is extreme in the US but not in other just as rich countries.
I don’t know what you are referring to with the irresponsible Sloth indulging.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-obes...
...advance technology. Some group is just going to do whatever they want and hope for the best, and we'll find out decades later if it was a bad idea and if we have a mess to clean up (which we probably won't clean up).
> Might be for the best.
People are going to assume that, because the changes going to be forced on you, like it or not.
However, those opioid receptors should not be pushed synthetically because they have been positioned by evolution in all sorts of strategic spots to encourage pro-social behavior, mating, eating, etc. that are part of our millions year old evolutionary program that must have intrinsic value in itself. If it has no intrinsic value and any happiness is as good as any other happiness, then someone spending the rest of their lives in an opioid haze and someone interacting with the world in a way that evolution tells them to in order to be happy would be considered equivalent, and that would be the end of the human race essentially.
Just like we learn to brush our teeth and eat candy and breath fresh air and even exercise. Not everyone does it but folks with means tend to…and means won’t be a restriction forever.
Meanwhile, the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews are going to refuse to talk to AIs - it’s a sin - and will go on having lots of kids, just like humanity always has, while the AI-addicts will be too addicted to bother having any at all. Maybe the future of the human race will be the people who reject AI rather than those who succumb to its charms
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/02/more-than-ha...
On a similar note I very much look forward to the day when entertainment providers leverage these so I can say to Netflix, et al, "I would like to watch a documentary about XYZ, narrated by someone that sounds like Joe Schmoe, and with the styling of SomeOtherShow".
And of course it's good for phones to make them worthless to steal, or else they'd be hard to use in public.
Software that locks out people with physical access from resetting a device is not an ethical, or effective, way to prevent hardware theft. It's dystopian.
I honestly think locked-down consumer devices are the next step in corporate power-play after cloud services: The control is just as firmly in the hands of corporation as with cloud, except now it doesn't even have to pay for bandwidth an energy costs. And costs for hardware updates actually turn into revenue!
Don’t date robots!
From company's perspective, moralism is commercial interests - it needs to be sufficiently non-objectionable for as many customers as possible.
Blocking information which could be used for harm is just as much “morality” as any other moderation.
I guess a better way to phrase it is that once you start policing morality on one particular matter and create tools for that purpose, those tools will eventually be used to police morality to conform to social consensus across the board.
An eager to please conversational partner who can generate endless content seems quite dangerous and addictive, especially when it crosses over into romantic areas. There's already posts of people spending entire days interacting with LLMs, using as their therapist, romantic partner, etc.
Combined with findings like social engineering through prompt injection on Bing [1], the potential for systems that can manipulate people is clear.
While some of us may think that the LLMs appear ultimately limited in their capabilities, there's a ton of specific applications where they're more than sufficient, including customer service chat bots and telephone scams that target vulnerable people. It's only a matter of time until scammers stop using international call centers and switch over to something powered by these technologies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976886