Seems like the most plausible explanation. OTOH it feels like this is the sort of thing that might have been discovered/mitigated more quickly had there been a human in the loop.
When I heard the crowd roar every time Trump said “we’re going to kick them out” I knew exactly what the crowd was cheering. Trump never used those moments to say “but America is a nation of immigrants and we celebrate their contributions”. He wanted to rile up a crowd while maintaining a fig-leaf of “oh it’s only illegals who are evil”
You don’t have to have a PhD to understand the appeal and consequences of nativist populism — just the slightest understanding of history.
To me it feels more like the old "this site only supports IE6". Instead of checking which JS engine the user has, check for specific api support and fail gracefully.
> It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.
He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"
And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.
No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".
It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.
> he very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true.
If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.
It's not literally him as an individual saying it this once, it's the large amount of it in total.
There's people who go around bothering flat earthers, but despite flat earthers claiming the contrary, they're quite small in number. No mass media effort, no corporate propaganda, no CEOs mentioning all the time.
The largest it ever got were things like the netflix shows. These are pretty illustrative; All of the big attention is not so much on "these people must be convinced of the roundedness of the planet" and more on the dissection of why these people refuse to accept something that is quite easy to prove across a wide variety of otherwise unconnected experiments.
However, the amount of money and energy spent on trying to convince people that “AI will take jobs”, by parties who would benefit from it, implies that these parties maybe don’t fully believe it, or believe that it needs to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If I am certain that I am winning, I sure don’t need to yell it from mountain tops. Unless my winning depends on everyone believing it.
I understood the intention of the statement and actually agree with it mostly. My point was just about the line of reasoning. But then again I also mostly agree that "AI" will make many jobs superfluous. People like Schmidt don't just try to announce that into reality; their point is about speeding up the process as they are invested in it and benefit from it happening earlier than if things would just progress naturally.
AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, it'll eventually end up subjugated military by the robots of a country that did invest in AI.
"But the commies will do it" is just an old hat version of what I just described.
And in the specifics of military, it's all nonsense anyway. Reagan pulled it with his dumb space lasers and we ain't got those up there anymore.
The only time it was kind of true was with nuclear weapons between the US and USSR. Both countries very rapidly obtained enough weapons to destroy the other utterly, and were just wasting their money afterwards.
For the smaller states, nuclear weapons have universally been not worth it. The only two "losers" right now are Ukraine and Iran, neither of which would be in the position to use their nuclear weapons had they retained/obtained them.
Anyone who's paid attention to these recent wars has seen the actual military development be lower tech weapons. Cheap drones rather than million dollar missiles.
With regard to "AI weaponry": First, AI weapons are broadly a dumb idea. Second: As mentioned, nuclear weapons exist. AI isn't going to magically stop [insert western country] from obliterating China if China were to send their army of wunderwaffe robots.
> At the same time, the team is developing simulation and modelling environments for testing solutions, AI infrastructure for rapid system deployment, and tools that can be immediately integrated into military units.
The drones are currently one of the major forces in the war. The AI tech is so nondescript that your quote is the entire content in the article you link.
The problem with nuclear deterrance is that it is a game theory divide-by-zero error.
For a state like Ukraine, whether they retained their nuclear weapons is irrelevant; They'd never use them against Russia because the retaliation will always be more severe, whether they target Moscow directly or mere "tactical" use, Ukraine would lose the nuclear exchange.
And Russia hasn't used it's nukes despite Ukraine not having any nor being under anyone's nuclear umbrella. The threat of sanctions has (thus far) been sufficient.
You're looking in a mirror and seeing somebody who never read a history book. Every single powerful nation that exists today was built upon war and invasion of some groups by other groups.
Eric Schmidt also raped a woman forty years younger than him, the students were objecting to that as much as the AI. Maybe don't schedule public speaking events after being accused of rape if you don't want to get booed.
It's up to you to choose to who to believe about what happened on the yacht in the gulf of Mexico, the seventy year old billionaire cheating on his wife, or the thirty year old woman who accused him of forcible rape. There was some form of financial settlement, but it's still in private arbitration.
The public documents said: “He followed me into a shower, slammed me against the wall, and forcibly raped me. I begged him to stop and cried out that he was hurting me, but he ignored my pleas. The next morning, Schmidt attempted to convince me that I enjoyed the assault.”
The point is that student activists handed out flyers about this in advance, so the crowd was aware.
You could just as easily say blame wealth for the rape accusations; there's much more incentive to make fake rape accusations of rich men than of poor men.
There really isn’t that much incentive to accuse a much wealthier man of rape. Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.
If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.
> Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.
"So"? The fact that someone is alleged of rape and doesn't lose their invited speech is hardly evidence of injustice. Allegations are not convictions nor proof of guilt.
It seems you are against the presumption of innocence. This presumption is itself a cornerstone of justice, not the opposite.
Note that I was not speaking on the guilt or innocence of any specific person, just pointing out that when it comes to committing sexual violence the incentives to make accusations don’t appear to actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.
> actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.
I think the opposite is true. Accusing someone of rape is often very bad for the accused person, even if the claim is never substantiated. False rape accusations are defamatory.
The presumption of innocence is a legal principle.
This is not a legal forum. (In either the literal "this is an internet forum" sense, or the broader "place for discussion" sense.)
If you want to defend your techbro idols of charges far, far too many of their brethren are unquestionably guilty of, you're going to need a stronger argument than "you're not allowed to say you think he's guilty unless a court agrees with you!!"
There's also a higher chance that wealthy perpetrators of sexual violence are under-represented in data. There's no denying the relationship between the 'justice' system and the wealthy. Case in point: Judge Persky in the Brock Turner trial.
The presumption of innocence is for courts of law.
The court of public opinion has no such rules.
If we, the people, see a credible accusation against someone who seems like the type of person who might be guilty of it, we are free to call it like we see it.
Naturally, this can lead to problems: after all, who is "credible" and who "seems like they might be guilty" can be (and very much have been) subject to a lot of bigotry. This is why we have the rules we do in courts of law. But anyone trying to enforce actual legal court rules on public online discussions generally just ends up looking like a jerk.
AI has a net negative perception in surveys across the US. It’s so unpopular that AI data center development is less popular than a nuclear power plant.
Yes I’d say this is more than representative of “every person” sentiment.
> Every indie developer should be working to get people off the big tech slop treadmill.
And what exactly are we supposed to do? Just try to ship alternatives to big tech slop? Actively try to work against them? Publish cracked software so they stop earning money?
Genuinely asking, as I'm not sure sure indie developers are the ones who should try to work against these enormous corporations, it's typically the job of the government to ensure society works and is fair, but they seem to currently be on the side of big tech, so indie developers can't realistically do anything about it, unless I'm missing what you're asking for here.
Agreed. The most effective efforts aren't going to come from indie developers. They aren't software issues, more regulatory. Busting up big tech into "baby bells" is the number one thing that needs to be done.
But now that we have essentially "boilerplate for free", I hope the degoogle/demeta/etc and self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble. But that'll probably take real AI and not slop based addiction machines.
> self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble
I love self-hosting, been doing it myself for quite some time already, and also notice a slight uptick among friends and acquaintances also interested in the same. When it comes to businesses, the ones that didn't already host their data in Europe/EU, are now desperately moving the data, but almost none of them go on-prem/self-hosted, for the typical reasons.
So, while there is a slight uptick, I'm not sure this is the "local stacks" moment, and also not sure that's actually what the public wants. I sometimes dream of setting up a company basically focused on helping people do more self-hosting in various ways, but after looking into it more, I always end up with the feeling that people typically don't actually want self-hosting, most people don't seem to care where the data lives. That'd be such a dream business though, so it's hard to let go of the idea :)
If I ask an LLM to come up with an entirely new story on its own, the output is not copyrightable.
But if I feed an LLM a Tom Clancy novel and ask it to regurgitate that same novel, I cannot legally then put the output on a website for anyone to download.
Again, no silver bullet. You will have to know what tasks it's capable of and how to elicit that solution. The bottleneck was never code the bottleneck still is solving the right problem in the right way.
when i ran a fediverse server for myself and 3 people, but allowed public signups if someone came by; it was very easy to ban people, and very easy to null-route entire swaths of the fediverse, because i didn't want their content on my service.
That's more what i got from that pull-quote. I know a company that has hundreds of individual forums, and those are all moderated quickly and correctly (last i heard). They're moderated so effectively they often get DDoS by Russian IPs for banning users for scam posts from that country.
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