Wasn’t Lenovo caught shipping laptops with spyware a few years ago?

I completely get your skepticism, but I was being serious. Yes, at least one life within my organization has literally been saved with the help of an AI drug discovery tool (used by a team of geneticists). I’m not going to get into specifics because nothing from the case has been released publicly (I’m sure a case report will pop up at some point) and I don’t want to get my ass fired, but it’s not a joke that these tools can be incredibly powerful in medicine when used by human experts, including helping to save lives.

I don’t hate AI as a tool. Especially in narrow, high-impact use-cases.

I work in medicine. I have already seen instances of AI, used as a tool by professionals, helping to literally save lives. The applications in medical research (and many scientific fields probably) are genuinely exciting. AlphaFold won a nobel for a reason. Insanely cool projects like the Human Cell Atlas wouldn’t be possible without it.

The problem is stupid-ass ‘general’ chatbots being forced down everyone’s throats so corpos can hoover up even fucking more of our data and sell more fucking ads.

Even these chatbots can be useful, but I won’t use any that collect data or sell ads.

In this regard I think DDG’s approach is pretty reasonable. You can turn on or off, you can use it without an account, and all queries are anonymized before being sent to the model.

I get that people have a reflexive “fuck AI” reaction because of the way it has been deployed in society. I truly understand it. But honestly that’s more of a capitalism problem than an AI problem. AI is a tool like a hammer. Just because evil corporate pricks are using it to bash our heads in doesn’t mean we should hate hammers, it means we should hate evil corporate pricks.

I would say that’s irrelevant for the crimes committed.

Irrelevant to the crimes themselves, but very relevant to the political pressure that can be applied to force action.

We all know the law doesn’t just get applied because it should be. Especially not against the rich. It gets applied, or at least has a chance to be, when enough people are paying attention and demanding justice.

Also, section 230 doesn’t apply to criminal prosecution (it may not even apply to the ongoing civil case), and there is strong evidence from the civil case that it was the executives themselves that explicitly chose not to implement safeguards that Meta employees were calling for.

We need new laws, more regulation, and fines that make Wall Street worried.

Absolutely. We need all of that plus way stronger antitrust. And we need the current law applied to bad actors, regardless of their riches.

Americans, as a general population, don’t give a shit about Myanmar, may not know it even exists. They don’t really care or know about video view controversies and the like.

One thing they do care A LOT about, is their kids. And the evidence is strong that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta executives knew children, on a mass scale, were being endangered by their products and deliberately, purposely allowed it to continue. They need to be prosecuted. If nobody even tries, then we’ve already lost.

High-quality studies take time. Yes there’s a lag, but doing the science is still super super important. Kind of get tired of this dismissive response every time a study gets published about a hot topic. Yes, we maybe ‘knew’ this, but sometimes we ‘know’ things and turn out to be partially or entirely wrong, or previously unknown factors are uncovered. If we want to truly understand a phenomenon it’s maybe best not to act like studying it is a waste of time.