The rise of generative AI is the death of picture or video evidence.

And the written word, as useful information is buried under mountains of generated trash.

No one to date knows what the real consequences of this will be.

Dark Ages II

Call me crazy, but maybe we shouldn’t be allowing people to work on such “advances” if they don’t have the humanities/social sciences background to understand the consequences.

Consequences be damned! We have quarterly earnings reports to worry about!

It could be really useful for various social or psychological research

The only application I can see for such research would be to extend and refine the distopian use cases. What else would such research be used for? It will only feed back into the cycle of privacy invasion and the surveillance state.

… or monitoring patient status.

Impersonal patient status monitoring (beyond vital statistics like heartbeat monitoring which we can already accomplish much more easily) will not have any practical benefit. The most likely outcome is that it will be used to justify reduced nurse staffing.

If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security.

~Satya Nadella, Microsoft Chairman and CEO, May 3, 2024

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-security-above-all-else/

So much for that I guess.

I can’t think of any beneficial uses for such a product.

One other note that no one else has addressed:

There is a lung cancer risk due to inhaling smoke, or really any kind of small particulates. Burnt organic material is particularly bad, as you’re basically inhaling very fine carbon particles. The lung cancer risk from smoking marijuana seems to be lower than that from smoking tobacco, because tobacco smoke in particular contains many cancer-causing chemicals, but there is also comparatively little research on health risks related to cannabis smoke.

Regardless, the point is not that smoking weed is a particular cancer risk, but that inhaling any smoke or vapor is a cancer risk, and the risk is increased by volume. Firefighters have an increased risk of developing lung cancer due to repeated and extended exposure.

I’m not saying don’t smoke at all - after all, life should be lived. I am saying that you should understand the risks you’re taking, and that they can be reduced by moderation.

Well, there’s no accounting for taste.

I think that change only comes through a big, imaginative idea

This seems overly optimistic to me. I think the historical record demonstrates that broad sociocultural change primarily happens after some great destructive crisis (war, famine, plague, etc) during which the status quo breaks down and a lot of people die, and the survivors have to pick up the remains and try to patch some form of society back together like a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces have been burned in a fire.

Sometimes, the survivors get together and try to imagine a better future, saying to themselves, “we don’t want our children to have to go through what we just went through.” More often, the person or people with the most resources left after the crisis take control, attempt to form society such that it sustains and increases their current power, and repeat the same old cycles of exploitation and selfishness.

There are very few cases I can think of for location data more precise than a postal code. Active navigation is the only one that occurs immediately.

Most apps that collect location data are doing so because they can, not because they really need it for anything. Most of the time, verifying that a user is within the country that they’re supposed to be should be enough for geolocation security.

Banning sales of the information won’t accomplish anything except increase the market value.

Banning the collection of such information is required.

“We didn’t start the fire…”

If I remember correctly, one of the biggest problems was the transportation issue, which no one had a solution for. How exactly do you safely transfer several tons of nuclear waste from, say, Shearon Harris to Yucca Mountain? that’s a very long train route. And you want to do this on a recurring basis? from several different locations around the country?

How exactly are you going to convince the states in between that they should permit you to transport nuclear waste across their borders, repeatedly? Who is going to provide security for all of this nuclear waste while it’s in transit? Who is going to accept liability for any accidents that occur, and who is going to handle the PR when a truckload of irradiated water gets dumped in some neighborhood?

Good luck getting anyone who even wants to explore establishing those arrangements as their full-time job. “Yes, I brokered the agreement for transporting radioactive material that resulted in a half-ton of waste being spread across ten backyards and an elementary school playground just outside of Birmingham.” Sounds like career suicide, and maybe not career suicide.

Fail to plan, plan to fail.

Whoosh.

So… He’s either incompetent or intentionally malicious. Those are all of the options. Either way, he should be standing trial for high crimes against the Unites States and its allies.

So… your idea is to have an organized general strike that includes everyone while not informing anyone ahead of time?

We need to not expect some hero figure to appear and change our world for us.

Login with ID form #10-T

Login with PEBKAC token

Hopefully the energy of this reaction won’t be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.

It’s traditional:

Well sure, we have to narratively excuse it somehow. Otherwise… take a Pokémon game and replace all the Pokémon with pit bulls and rot weilers &etc and then you have dog fighting simulator.