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We are witnessing the birth of a new phase that will leave a scar on mankind and make the sins of the Church, Hitler, North Korea and every other despotic regim

We are witnessing the birth of a new phase that will leave a scar on mankind and make the sins of the Church, Hitler, North Korea and every other despotic regime that has tried to limit human freedom through the ages look amateurish if we do nothing about it now. Nazis killed approx 40M people. Communists add another 100-200M to that total. Are you really suggesting that "large unbridled corporations" have proven through history that they will kill more than 240M people? The only mechanism I can think of by which google might even approach this is by creating evil AI. Is that what you are referring to, or something else?

azakai 10y ago
Killing millions of people is horrible, but taking away the privacy of billions is terrifying as well. And while obviously murder is worse than stalking, we don't really know where things will end up. We are in uncharted territory with the new information collection society we live in.
z5h 10y ago
Tobacco killed 100 million. Sugary drinks alone are linked to 180000 deaths/year. (And of course big sugar lied to us http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-ind...). So, yes. Anything in the name of profit.
- cynicalkane 10y ago
  If capitalism went away, sugar and tobacco would still be a thing. For example, tobacco shortages sometimes caused economic unrest in the Soviet Union.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Yes, clearly murder and forced starvation is totally equivalent to people making lifestyle choices that reduce their lifetime. Clearly anyone selling soul food is just as guilty of murder (hate crimes?) as the guy who shot up that church in Charleston. And don't get me started on those murderous Punjabis, putting ghee on everything...
  - z5h 10y ago
    It's not the thing that's being sold that is the problem. It's the systematic ways that the peddlers lie and game the system that prevent us us from making the choice in "lifestyle choice". Seems they got to you too. Or perhaps you're one of them.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Read his comment history. It's fascinating in a sick and terrifying way.
    - davidivadavid 10y ago
      People are lied into drinking soda?
      - z5h 10y ago
        Yes.
        davidivadavid 10y ago
        Oh okay, moving along then. I just thought people drank sugary drinks because they liked it. Silly me. But you're right, it must be because they're oblivious to the fact they contain sugar, I mean what with the fact the media completely silences that subject... and it's not even written on the bottles. Fucking corporations amirite.
        Smaug123 10y ago
        Analogy: swap out sugar for smoking. People smoke because they like it. And because they can't stop. One of the reasons they can't stop is that there are massive industries devoted to ensuring that they don't (witness, for instance, the rising levels of nicotine in cigarettes, presumably intended to make the product more addictive). I mean, what with the fact that the media completely silences that subject… and it's not even written on the packets with giant health warnings and pictures of blackened lungs. Corporations, amirite? The above japery is to demonstrate that to a large extent, your sarcasm misses the point.
thesimpsons1022 10y ago
what about when president trump starts forcing Google to use its AI to detect Muslims?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Or have their cars drive them across the Wall, or to the nearest detention centre.
inanutshellus 10y ago
It could be identifying you as part of a group then excluding you from job/status/money/influence. The future is subtle damage, not necessarily heads-on-pikes evil.
- redwards510 10y ago
  This subtlety is exactly what I fear the most. Detailed personality profiles are being created about you. You can't modify them and you can't argue about their accuracy. Potential employers, romantic partners, and friends will be able to read these and shun you.
ta_donk_gt 10y ago
> Nazis killed approx 40M people. Communists add another 100-200M to that total. Without wanting to start a political battle here, this is not behavior that is limited to political systems. Western democracies have inflicted their fair share of death and carnage as well, though because they are "our team" we tend to see our behavior as justified and the other teams' behaviors as unjustified. Humans with sufficient power will always eliminate any potential threats to their power, and do what they feel is necessary to expediently reach their goals...once that course of action has been successfully justified. That justification happens via one of or a combination of two ways: 1) rhetoric, propaganda, coalition building, education, etc. (various means of influencing those that might present road blocks to accept the behavior), and/or 2) possessing sufficient power that challenging the behavior is not an option. Once corporations are able to politically justify eliminating those that stand in their way, they will...all humans in history with sufficient power have done so, and that is never going to change. Many large corporations already have more wealth than half of the nation states on this planet. That is a lot of power. The cornerstones of future political justifications are happening in things like TPP effectively raising the corporation to the level of nation state in some regards. It will happen, it is only a matter of time. Initially it will be the ability to capture and imprison those threats to their power, and eventually it will lead to war and killing. This is the nature of our species. It's not going to change.
ksk 10y ago
>The only mechanism I can think of by which google might even approach this is by creating evil AI If you control people's access to information, you control people's minds, albeit indirectly. Its a simple philosophy that has kinda-sorta worked in China. You can get large scale approval from the public for pretty horrendous things like the US has done, simply by controlling what gets seen on cable news/mainstream media, etc. If Google is the gatekeeper of all information (so far it isn't), and they're ultimately controlled by the NSA or CIA, then we're screwed. So how many people has the US killed? How many of those wars could have been avoided if the public weren't fed lies?
PavlovsCat 10y ago
You know why murder is bad? Because it keeps a person from living their own life. So yes, fucking with billions of people for x years, at best just influencing them a bit, at worst exploiting them rather extremely, soaking up 90% of their time so some psychopath can buy an additional golf course, absolutely does amount to a whole lot of murder. Remember early capitalism? Children in mines? So when someone gets exploited and then dies of diseases, or lives as a sick poor person for decades, is that not a sibling of murder? There is something as the walking dead, there really is. As Nietzsche said, the last man lives the longest... but the question probably is, do they actually live. People seem to become more timid and more neurotic, instead of more alive, more defenseless rather than more skillful, they suffer "information overload" rather than being more informed. That's just anecdotal, but I'm amazed at just how many weak and stuck up people I meet each day, and how young so many of them are. Between their parents being fools or having no time for them, and them being sprayed with the mental equivalent of fast food everywhere else, sometimes even reaching into the education systems -- all that does have an effect. You might say we're being gaslighted on a global scale.. and mixed, dishonest signals hurt even the strongest people, others they can drive positively insane. And they are only emitted by the unhinged, too. Only broken people, or people in broken moments (same difference really, even though I speak of "types of people" I ultimately do mean types of behaviors and habits etc., I think everybody can theoretically change but it's easier and more satisfying to be self-righteous) want power for the sake of power, all rationalizations and neat excuses be damned, that's what is at the core of it and it matters, and they are slowly molding us in the image of the screaming, empty abyss that is their personality. Would you rather live for 2 weeks as you, or for 50 years with very strong dementia? If you set aside how strongly I feel about this, that I have chips on my shoulder and pet peeves; do you at least see my point in principle? For totalitarian systems, murder is not an end in itself. Making people, their individual agency, their unpredictable "spark", totally obsolete, by murder or other means, THAT is at the heart of it. And in that sense, we live in a world that is becoming so totalitarian it might not even afford us the honesty of murdering us.

azakai 10y ago

Killing millions of people is horrible, but taking away the privacy of billions is terrifying as well. And while obviously murder is worse than stalking, we don't really know where things will end up. We are in uncharted territory with the new information collection society we live in.

z5h 10y ago

Tobacco killed 100 million. Sugary drinks alone are linked to 180000 deaths/year. (And of course big sugar lied to us http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-ind...). So, yes. Anything in the name of profit.

cynicalkane 10y ago
If capitalism went away, sugar and tobacco would still be a thing. For example, tobacco shortages sometimes caused economic unrest in the Soviet Union.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
Yes, clearly murder and forced starvation is totally equivalent to people making lifestyle choices that reduce their lifetime. Clearly anyone selling soul food is just as guilty of murder (hate crimes?) as the guy who shot up that church in Charleston. And don't get me started on those murderous Punjabis, putting ghee on everything...
- z5h 10y ago
  It's not the thing that's being sold that is the problem. It's the systematic ways that the peddlers lie and game the system that prevent us us from making the choice in "lifestyle choice". Seems they got to you too. Or perhaps you're one of them.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Read his comment history. It's fascinating in a sick and terrifying way.
  - davidivadavid 10y ago
    People are lied into drinking soda?
    - z5h 10y ago
      Yes.
      - davidivadavid 10y ago
        Oh okay, moving along then. I just thought people drank sugary drinks because they liked it. Silly me. But you're right, it must be because they're oblivious to the fact they contain sugar, I mean what with the fact the media completely silences that subject... and it's not even written on the bottles. Fucking corporations amirite.
        Smaug123 10y ago
        Analogy: swap out sugar for smoking. People smoke because they like it. And because they can't stop. One of the reasons they can't stop is that there are massive industries devoted to ensuring that they don't (witness, for instance, the rising levels of nicotine in cigarettes, presumably intended to make the product more addictive). I mean, what with the fact that the media completely silences that subject… and it's not even written on the packets with giant health warnings and pictures of blackened lungs. Corporations, amirite? The above japery is to demonstrate that to a large extent, your sarcasm misses the point.

thesimpsons1022 10y ago

what about when president trump starts forcing Google to use its AI to detect Muslims?

dredmorbius 10y ago
Or have their cars drive them across the Wall, or to the nearest detention centre.

inanutshellus 10y ago

It could be identifying you as part of a group then excluding you from job/status/money/influence. The future is subtle damage, not necessarily heads-on-pikes evil.

redwards510 10y ago
This subtlety is exactly what I fear the most. Detailed personality profiles are being created about you. You can't modify them and you can't argue about their accuracy. Potential employers, romantic partners, and friends will be able to read these and shun you.

ta_donk_gt 10y ago

> Nazis killed approx 40M people. Communists add another 100-200M to that total. Without wanting to start a political battle here, this is not behavior that is limited to political systems. Western democracies have inflicted their fair share of death and carnage as well, though because they are "our team" we tend to see our behavior as justified and the other teams' behaviors as unjustified. Humans with sufficient power will always eliminate any potential threats to their power, and do what they feel is necessary to expediently reach their goals...once that course of action has been successfully justified. That justification happens via one of or a combination of two ways: 1) rhetoric, propaganda, coalition building, education, etc. (various means of influencing those that might present road blocks to accept the behavior), and/or 2) possessing sufficient power that challenging the behavior is not an option. Once corporations are able to politically justify eliminating those that stand in their way, they will...all humans in history with sufficient power have done so, and that is never going to change. Many large corporations already have more wealth than half of the nation states on this planet. That is a lot of power. The cornerstones of future political justifications are happening in things like TPP effectively raising the corporation to the level of nation state in some regards. It will happen, it is only a matter of time. Initially it will be the ability to capture and imprison those threats to their power, and eventually it will lead to war and killing. This is the nature of our species. It's not going to change.

ksk 10y ago

>The only mechanism I can think of by which google might even approach this is by creating evil AI If you control people's access to information, you control people's minds, albeit indirectly. Its a simple philosophy that has kinda-sorta worked in China. You can get large scale approval from the public for pretty horrendous things like the US has done, simply by controlling what gets seen on cable news/mainstream media, etc. If Google is the gatekeeper of all information (so far it isn't), and they're ultimately controlled by the NSA or CIA, then we're screwed. So how many people has the US killed? How many of those wars could have been avoided if the public weren't fed lies?

PavlovsCat 10y ago

You know why murder is bad? Because it keeps a person from living their own life. So yes, fucking with billions of people for x years, at best just influencing them a bit, at worst exploiting them rather extremely, soaking up 90% of their time so some psychopath can buy an additional golf course, absolutely does amount to a whole lot of murder. Remember early capitalism? Children in mines? So when someone gets exploited and then dies of diseases, or lives as a sick poor person for decades, is that not a sibling of murder? There is something as the walking dead, there really is. As Nietzsche said, the last man lives the longest... but the question probably is, do they actually live. People seem to become more timid and more neurotic, instead of more alive, more defenseless rather than more skillful, they suffer "information overload" rather than being more informed. That's just anecdotal, but I'm amazed at just how many weak and stuck up people I meet each day, and how young so many of them are. Between their parents being fools or having no time for them, and them being sprayed with the mental equivalent of fast food everywhere else, sometimes even reaching into the education systems -- all that does have an effect. You might say we're being gaslighted on a global scale.. and mixed, dishonest signals hurt even the strongest people, others they can drive positively insane. And they are only emitted by the unhinged, too. Only broken people, or people in broken moments (same difference really, even though I speak of "types of people" I ultimately do mean types of behaviors and habits etc., I think everybody can theoretically change but it's easier and more satisfying to be self-righteous) want power for the sake of power, all rationalizations and neat excuses be damned, that's what is at the core of it and it matters, and they are slowly molding us in the image of the screaming, empty abyss that is their personality. Would you rather live for 2 weeks as you, or for 50 years with very strong dementia? If you set aside how strongly I feel about this, that I have chips on my shoulder and pet peeves; do you at least see my point in principle? For totalitarian systems, murder is not an end in itself. Making people, their individual agency, their unpredictable "spark", totally obsolete, by murder or other means, THAT is at the heart of it. And in that sense, we live in a world that is becoming so totalitarian it might not even afford us the honesty of murdering us.