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This is a particular interesting part of American culture: The sentiment is that it is problematic when the government develops these technologies, but it is co

This is a particular interesting part of American culture: The sentiment is that it is problematic when the government develops these technologies, but it is completely OK to let private entities develop them.

_heimdall 3y ago
Agreed it is a weird contradiction, though personally I'm not okay with private entities developing these tools/weapons either.
cherryteastain 3y ago
There's only one US Government and we know it did fairly bad things. There are many private entities, although often not benevolent, most still have space for the benefit of doubt. OpenAI, DeepMind or Anthropic haven't done anything that compares to, say, MKUltra or lying about Iraqi WMDs to start decade long wars.
- dahart 3y ago
  This is kind-of making the parent’s point. There are lots of private companies that have done very bad things, too many to even count, as bad as your examples and worse. And there are thousands upon thousands of sub-organizations of the US government, some of which do very good things and are definitely benevolent, because there is no built-in profit motive. Private companies almost cannot be benevolent and survive, by definition. There is no line between government and corporations. These are all groups of people, and some people do bad things. The only way to prevent bad things is to do them in the open and have oversight, and that’s more likely to happen in the government than in private companies, maybe.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >There are lots of private companies that have done very bad things, too many to even count, as bad as your examples and worse Absolutely not; there's no private company that's shot and bombed the life out of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in cold blood.
    - dahart 3y ago
      Of course there are private companies that have committed atrocities and attempted genocide. You haven’t taken any history classes? Your statement is false. The history of private corporate atrocities is hundreds, if not thousands of years old [1]. I don’t know what you’re referring to specifically, but a lot of what you attribute to the government is done by or with private military contractors and private weapons suppliers. Not to mention that wars in general are often driven by economic interests, fueled, justified, and supplied by private corporations. In my comment above, I also had in mind industrial and environmental damage, unintentional death by private interests, environmental accidents and disasters, and coverups, which we can’t even count but the WHO estimates is in the tens of millions per year globally, today. [1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/214112224.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/214112224.pdf
buywarbonds 3y ago
Yeah because the government already has an enormous power that no private entities have, the monopoly on violence. They have enough power.
Spooky23 3y ago
When the United State deregulated media to essentially eliminate the public service component of media, we created a race to the bottom that we're now realizing in the public space. The generation of people in their 30s and 40s running the country spent summers listening to Rush Limbaugh over lunch with grandpa, grew up to consume news and comment from message boards and later social media, entered adulthood in the middle of an endless cycle of warfare, and came into their own in this era of propaganda and information warfare. Mainline protestantism has been displaced by Pastor Bob and prosperity gospel. We're replacing the craven boomers with nihlists. The underlying trope of most propagandistic media is always to discredit the most powerful entity in the room - the government. Why? The money people behind faux-grassroots media are almost always reactionaries who often build their empires on the government teat and don't appreciate the irony. Particularly true of extractive capitalists in the petroleum and materials industries. The US Government giveth, and is the only entity that can taketh. So "rule of law" for me, and "freedumb" for thee.
paulddraper 3y ago
The government is far more powerful than any private entity And there's no unsubscribe button

_heimdall 3y ago

Agreed it is a weird contradiction, though personally I'm not okay with private entities developing these tools/weapons either.

cherryteastain 3y ago

There's only one US Government and we know it did fairly bad things. There are many private entities, although often not benevolent, most still have space for the benefit of doubt. OpenAI, DeepMind or Anthropic haven't done anything that compares to, say, MKUltra or lying about Iraqi WMDs to start decade long wars.

dahart 3y ago
This is kind-of making the parent’s point. There are lots of private companies that have done very bad things, too many to even count, as bad as your examples and worse. And there are thousands upon thousands of sub-organizations of the US government, some of which do very good things and are definitely benevolent, because there is no built-in profit motive. Private companies almost cannot be benevolent and survive, by definition. There is no line between government and corporations. These are all groups of people, and some people do bad things. The only way to prevent bad things is to do them in the open and have oversight, and that’s more likely to happen in the government than in private companies, maybe.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >There are lots of private companies that have done very bad things, too many to even count, as bad as your examples and worse Absolutely not; there's no private company that's shot and bombed the life out of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in cold blood.
  - dahart 3y ago
    Of course there are private companies that have committed atrocities and attempted genocide. You haven’t taken any history classes? Your statement is false. The history of private corporate atrocities is hundreds, if not thousands of years old [1]. I don’t know what you’re referring to specifically, but a lot of what you attribute to the government is done by or with private military contractors and private weapons suppliers. Not to mention that wars in general are often driven by economic interests, fueled, justified, and supplied by private corporations. In my comment above, I also had in mind industrial and environmental damage, unintentional death by private interests, environmental accidents and disasters, and coverups, which we can’t even count but the WHO estimates is in the tens of millions per year globally, today. [1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/214112224.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/214112224.pdf

buywarbonds 3y ago

Yeah because the government already has an enormous power that no private entities have, the monopoly on violence. They have enough power.

Spooky23 3y ago

When the United State deregulated media to essentially eliminate the public service component of media, we created a race to the bottom that we're now realizing in the public space. The generation of people in their 30s and 40s running the country spent summers listening to Rush Limbaugh over lunch with grandpa, grew up to consume news and comment from message boards and later social media, entered adulthood in the middle of an endless cycle of warfare, and came into their own in this era of propaganda and information warfare. Mainline protestantism has been displaced by Pastor Bob and prosperity gospel. We're replacing the craven boomers with nihlists. The underlying trope of most propagandistic media is always to discredit the most powerful entity in the room - the government. Why? The money people behind faux-grassroots media are almost always reactionaries who often build their empires on the government teat and don't appreciate the irony. Particularly true of extractive capitalists in the petroleum and materials industries. The US Government giveth, and is the only entity that can taketh. So "rule of law" for me, and "freedumb" for thee.

paulddraper 3y ago

The government is far more powerful than any private entity And there's no unsubscribe button