The AI age is the "age of no consent" | Hacker News Reader

The AI age is the "age of no consent"

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82 pointsBallsInIt29 comments

Agree with most of the article, yet part that was actually worth commenting on slightly:

Bill Wolf - "Being born on 4/20 is unprofessional."

"Upon reviewing your application materials, we found that the information provided in regards to your birthdate on LinkedIn, specifically 4/20, seems inconsistent with the professional standards we uphold within our organization. While we appreciate individuality, we also prioritize a professional and mature approach in all aspects of our work environment."

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wolfbill_being-born-on-420-is...

That's ridiculous.

It's clearly his parents who were being unprofessional, by conceiving him on 7/20.

Yet another reason to go for ISO 8601 date formats

Sending emails on 13:37 is frowned upon..

> We’re in the age of no consent. A time where everyday people have to follow the rules, but AI companies and AI toolmen do not.

I wonder if this is how it always was, with elites and non elites, except now it’s all just in the open.

Except this generation's elite are mostly divorced from history and tradition and lack a sense of noblesse oblige. The worlds moving fast enough for things to be different this time - or so the thinking goes.

>lack a sense of noblesse oblige

The super wealthy of today have zero class and it really shows.

All ass, zero class?

Yes, but in the past decades the elites have accumulated wealth and resources at rates we haven't seen probably since before the French Revolution, depening on the metric you could also call it unprecedented.

Additionally many of todays elites have a social-darwinistic view where everybody that is not on top actively deserves to suffer and perish.

And this unfortunately falls together with the moment where AI reduces the number of real people ultrarich people need to control a population to a historic minimum. It is going to get much worse, before it is going to get better.

The social darwinistic view is just a mental protection mechanism against responsibility. Its like calluses but for the careless.

Probably a correct observation. Nobody is protected against believing excuses that conviniently ease the cognitive dissonance. That includes you and me. But the difference is of course that we are not hoarding resources in a world that would need them and have such a negative impact on others.

Social darwnism is about getting paid.

As an IT professional I don't have to put up with grave injustices like less than optimal rent seeking for myself and friends.

Whatever decision I come to is basically the results of a science experiment. Of course, the results of the experiment just prove I am always right. If the results proved otherwise then obviously there was something flawed in the method and design of the experiment.

Science is the method that proves what my friends and I thought all along was not just true but to think otherwise proves you are an immoral person. Unlike my friends and I that the experiments prove we are the good guys.

If this wasn't true, my salary would be much less. "the market is always right"

I think it definitely has been like this for a long time now at least. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Facebook. They harvested millions of users data and used it for political manipulation (Cambridge Analytica) without users consent. I suppose now its more out in the open with the recent verdicts on allowing these companies to scrape the entirety of the web stealing millions of IP's to use for their models, among other things.

The FTC fined them $5bn for doing that. Maybe that wasn't enough considering how profitable they are, but having some way to check their power is very different from a world where no checks exist at all, which is what AI policy in the US currently is.

Facebook hasn't even existed for a long time yet.

Whatever happened to the mantra "Information wants to be free"

Having my own data leased back to me wasn't exactly what I had in mind

How is it being leased back to you?

I think the idea is that people's written word, and artistic endeavors, and code, and everything else one could post online, is eventually scraped by AI whereby that AI is sold back to the producer of the original content.

You do realize that open weights exist? Proprietary models suck, yes, but they can be distilled.

You're attacking me personally when I was agreeing the contents of the comment in an objective manner.

Market fundamentalism is what happened.

Information wants to be ? How naive.

Information wants to be commoditized, but that process is amoral unless I am getting a cut as a rent seeker.

If I am getting paid then it is just a form of darwinism and to think otherwise is to be anti-science.

If someone else is getting paid then obviously whatever we are talking about is a great injustice.

"Information wants to be free, as long as it's not my information."

"...and as long it's created by a human."

(Because I feel proponents of generative AI appear to play the "info wants to be free" card as well.)

It's called domestic terrorism.

Interesting read.

The article is worth the attention.

> diluting tech’s understanding of “ethical” and “empathy” into meaninglessness

That's the overarching motive not only in tech, but in culture and business as well. It was a long ride and even caught the lefties, anarchists, anybody on the outer rim, really, while turning the right wing and any kind of extremists into the opposite: people with meaning and order as ethics and empathy for people who want these ethics. It's so strange and twisted sometimes but if you look at tech and AI, the picture, via analogies, becomes clear.

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