4 ms·

This is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't

by reb 3y ago

This is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't go unacknowledged.

mwhitfield 3y ago
It's only "hypocrisy" if it's the same people saying it. The media zeitgeist is not a person.
- nsagent 3y ago
  Microsoft has a very long history of fighting piracy and they are one of OpenAI's main funders. It's definitely hypocrisy. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: "Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth." [1] Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy." [2] [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-curb-microsofts-obsession-with-anti-piracy-technology/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-cu... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-sits-down-with-cnbcs-jon-fortt.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
- Intralexical 3y ago
  Idk man; I think our values and the enforcement of those values should have some moral self-consistency to them on a cultural level too.
  - mwhitfield 3y ago
    There are hundreds of millions or billions of us, though, depending on how broad a brush you use. Any given issue or value is going to have someone, in fact quite a lot of someones, on every conceivable side of it. Even if you limit your scope to the people who have a substantial voice in the culture.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      Yeah, but it's not a good look when the influence-weighted average of all those people applies double standards for different groups in similar situations. I mean, even when you take just a single person, they're probably going to have a couple conflicting feelings towards any one topic. And yet, if the emergent result of that internal conflict doesn't produce some level of self-consistency in resulting opinions and actions, then something's not quite right. Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place. A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids. Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.
mcmoor 3y ago
I see the exact hypocrisy from the opposite side too. Praising pirating while treating AI as crime against humanity.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Depends on your lens. If you view it as "crime", sure. If you view it as "obtaining quality content", you can see why and where these users' priorities are. The web is already this riddled SEO optimized spam-Festa that makes it hard to find what you want or desire, now AI comes in and increases the spam tenfold. AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
In a vacuum this shouldn't be an issue at all. We make stuff, we honor and benefit the creators, we share as needed and progress humanity as a whole. So I can understand the more optimistic approaches to AI as a tech revolution. But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one. But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill. The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.

by reb 3y ago

This is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't go unacknowledged.

mwhitfield 3y ago

It's only "hypocrisy" if it's the same people saying it. The media zeitgeist is not a person.

nsagent 3y ago
Microsoft has a very long history of fighting piracy and they are one of OpenAI's main funders. It's definitely hypocrisy. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: "Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth." [1] Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy." [2] [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-curb-microsofts-obsession-with-anti-piracy-technology/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-cu... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-sits-down-with-cnbcs-jon-fortt.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
Intralexical 3y ago
Idk man; I think our values and the enforcement of those values should have some moral self-consistency to them on a cultural level too.
- mwhitfield 3y ago
  There are hundreds of millions or billions of us, though, depending on how broad a brush you use. Any given issue or value is going to have someone, in fact quite a lot of someones, on every conceivable side of it. Even if you limit your scope to the people who have a substantial voice in the culture.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    Yeah, but it's not a good look when the influence-weighted average of all those people applies double standards for different groups in similar situations. I mean, even when you take just a single person, they're probably going to have a couple conflicting feelings towards any one topic. And yet, if the emergent result of that internal conflict doesn't produce some level of self-consistency in resulting opinions and actions, then something's not quite right. Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place. A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids. Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.

mcmoor 3y ago

I see the exact hypocrisy from the opposite side too. Praising pirating while treating AI as crime against humanity.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Depends on your lens. If you view it as "crime", sure. If you view it as "obtaining quality content", you can see why and where these users' priorities are. The web is already this riddled SEO optimized spam-Festa that makes it hard to find what you want or desire, now AI comes in and increases the spam tenfold. AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

In a vacuum this shouldn't be an issue at all. We make stuff, we honor and benefit the creators, we share as needed and progress humanity as a whole. So I can understand the more optimistic approaches to AI as a tech revolution. But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one. But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill. The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.