Yes, I am.
1,346 karma · joined August 3, 2021
Someone has to sit near the top of the tree, making decisions whose impact has to be accepted by the shareholders, employees and customers of a company, and communicated to the governments of the world. Not all products and services can be implemented by a small mom-and-pop shop. Some things need scale. And not only that.
Corporations are far (far!) from perfect, but at least they aspire in the right direction (where "right" is defined by the zeitgeist of those people they service above, and so by definition what behavior will a corporation tend towards).
Governments are beholden to no-one but their sponsors and shallow populist trends they use to rise to power by exploiting the large distance between voter and representative, often nothing in common to discuss, so the debate is kept low-level, basic, and full of the same lies repeated over and over again to slightly different audiences every 4 years or so. Politicians are demonstrably not aligned with what is best for the populace, but rather what is best for them clinging to power and servicing their behind-the-scene sponsors (or in some countries, public lobby). We can't change that property of governments easily, but we can, in theory, hold companies to a higher standard than "do whatever the highest bidder of our party says". We can vote with our money, and vote with our speech, and boycott a product or a service much more easily than we can outvote an incumbent party or a law, when they betray us. As we see in France, protests do nothing. Big once we have aligned corporations to us, they can represent our voice in front of large, cumbersome governments, and bring balance back to us. So, I'd like corporations to stay near the top of the tree, and not make this a government autocratic monopoly of control.
P.S.: BTW when you say "companies are beholden to nothing but the markets..." I hope you realize... we're the markets. Not any less than we're the voters.
I just said, people who are interested by their own success at the expense of society are in fact analogous to cancer cells, which also broke from the shared programming and optimized for local survival and reproduction.
That's not me morally judging people who are "intrigued by topics". I'm clearly also among those "intrigued" by these topics. I'm just saying it how it is: when higher order breaks down, the more local solution hurts the whole. It's a fact.
We can discuss how selfish people are sometimes useful in society. Because society is complex like that. Maybe true for cancer too, who knows. We really have poor understanding of systems, and clearly are averse to learning more, because someone may get insulted by being compared to cancer. I don't judge cancer, why do you? :D
I'm asking... prove to me that governments vs corporations are a kind of conflict where governments are always correct. Because if they ARE NOT... then the idea "we must break up any company before it can even talk to us" is bullshit, isn't it?
If you're convinced, for some silly reason, that you live in a legit republic, I recommend researching how a banana republic operates, or say Russia, which is also a democracy & a republic on paper, and learn how every single procedure and institution is subverted and behind the decorum, the rulers are doing whatever they want, basically.
And once you do this... look back to your country with new eyes, and you'll be shocked. It's the same thing. But with more make-up on.
Their precious!
Except a government is larger and essentially held hostage by the two or so major incumbent parties that have settled into every developed democracy. If people want to make the situation better, what are they supposed to do, exactly?
How did the protests in France go? Citizens destroyed some private property. And that was it. The government is fine and the president is fine.
Why is Microsoft bigger and scarier than the UK government? Be specific and don't hide behind synonyms and fragmented terminology?
UK GDP is $3.131 trillion, and Microsoft's is $200 billion. You actually think Microsoft is way too big in this situation and has to be broken down so the little-wittle government is not threatened by their displeasure? Oh, God.
I'm not even talking about the fact a government has monopoly on its territory, monopoly on using force through police etc. and it has military, what does Microsoft have here that makes it scarier than the damn government, huh?
In truth, a government also depends on its voters, and a company also depends on its customers. But none of this what I'm talking about. I'm talking about governments implementing FORCE on corporations because they're big enough to be heard and seen and to challenge them. Is that good? Why?
Take a country like Russia where only what Putin says matters, everyone else is his pawn, even if on paper they may be billionaires holding big companies. Is that an improvement over having genuine corporate voices making their point?
Just to make this clear, in a normal democracy, anyone can challenge a government or institution, even separate individuals, as long as they have merit, legal or moral, to their claim and they can demonstrate it.
The user proposes that by default all claims of a corporation to a country are illegal and harmful and they should be punished and split apart for it.
So... if that's a valid argument, it suggests an unchecked government, with no comparable size organization to challenge it is better somehow. Governments are better. But are they?
Prove it.
But we still have LLaMA. And more are coming. The question is what we do with this. What if acknowledging psychopathy as beneficial ends up amplifying it, and this becomes the straw to break our society's back?
Thing is, what's beneficial to an individual is not necessarily beneficial to society as a whole. They're often in opposition in extremes. It's like cancer. All cells working together means long-term survival of the animal. Cancer however does not cooperate, steals energy, efs around all the time, reproduces, and basically has a lot more fun than any other cell might. But it also kills the animal long-term.
So what is beneficial? To be cancer or not to be? Depends beneficial to whom. Goals.
Say an argument from authority. Sure, some guy who digs dirt may know more about building skyscrapers than an architect who spend 40 years doing it. But, still?
So in that context, I hope we start recognizing what fallacies are. They may not match standards of formal logic, but also if formal logic worked then we wouldn't need to grow artificial intelligence from noise, we'd instead feed it rational thought models and then it it comes up with flawless conclusions. Which is how we imagined AI for decades prior and all out attempts failed. They failed because formal models are highly restrictive and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Another issue of AI is the feedback loop. If you tell an AI "help me end my life" and it follows your instructions blindly, it'll end up convincing you to do so, as happened with a young family man recently, and maybe more we haven't heard of.
Existing art has no feedback loop. Movies are unlike AI because it's what they are. They don't follow orders, they just exist as immutable artifacts of human expression back when they were created. So to me it's different.
Oh, and also you'll soon be able to cook a model at home, so all these AI limitations are irrelevant mid-term.
We should trust our basic intelligence and judge content in the time period it was made and extract what we find valuable out of it. Anything else suggests either we're stupid, or we want to be treated like we're stupid. And that's a sad future for humanity if so.
In essence, the party is stupid. Both are, obviously.
And... this is exactly the problem. People together are supposed to be greater than the sum of us. But we see exactly the opposite. We discard our intelligence in favor of much simpler institutional and cultural algorithms, which fail us repeatedly. Extremely frustrating.
ChatGPT "sees itself" in countless different ways, mostly informed by clichés trained into it about what we expect it to say. And it can't draw, so we get the Midjourney police sketch based on the text it makes. Basically BS through and through.
What the heck are our priorities here?
If there was JUST Mastodon, and one decent client for each platform... well... there wouldn't be Twitter anymore.
"Let's see if we can get a Biden sequel going in, if not, maybe we can use other existing IP, like a Kennedy. What other things are popular now? Women! Oof, Hillary in 2016, though, that underperformed at the box office..."