Data centre capacity, they seem to be making an emphasis on access to independent power sources.

member of a group of wealthy individuals wielding sovereign power

This doesn’t seem right. Russian oligarchs do not wield sovereign power, yet they are still oligarchs.

They wield power, but the term sovereign doesn’t seem appropriate.

Believe it or not, but there are externalities to the polemics you are describing.

The ostentatious posturing (I am a tiny minority that is virtuous, everyone else just wants to punish people and doesn’t want the law to apply to everyone equally) is pretty ignorant. I’ve lived in multiple countries across North America, Europe and Asia, it’s clear that you haven’t thought about this.

It’s comically easy to find well known (locally) examples where even the non polemical version of your arguement doesn’t hold.

EDIT: I would appreciate a counter argument from people who don’t agree. I am genuinely curious, because to me this seems like common sense. And I can provide multiple example from different cultures about why this rhetoric does not sound convincing.

I don’t think the reference to “ostentatious posturing” is uncharitable. Just look at the text. This copytext is pretty standard and clearly aimed at self-aggrandization.

Sure, but he is not an oligarch.

Literally promoting phrenology.

That’s why I said this article was subpar. And I even commented on this in pretty harsh terms:

the regime members are really busy doing their best to make a new metaphorical rope

I don’t agree with a lot of what they say, but I don’t believe they are malicious, at least to the extent that many American news sources are.

The Economist is generally a pretty good news source, but I thought this article was subpar.

Irrespective of whether this facial evaluation algorithm works or not, as things stand today, it is pointless to discuss its use in the context of meritocracy. A regime founded upon the rejection of personal responsibility, corruption and criminality makes such discussions irrelevant (algorithm or no algorithm).

At the risk of sounding like an accelerationist, I can’t get rid of the feeling that the regime members are really busy doing their best to make a new metaphorical rope.

Xi is not an oligarch, to my knowledge, he has always worked in the CCP.

You’re not going to beat the Americans at their own game. It’s a society that does not respect the rule of law, does not believe in true market competition and does not believe in democracy.

If you think I am acting out, consider the following point: recently Meta was found to have directly (in a premeditated manner) promoted scams/frauds that netted them $16B in commission in a single year. We all know that nothing will be done about this even under a hypothetical centre-right US government.

How do we know that? Well was anything done about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour in the 90s?

But for me, the real irony is the polemics about competition and “free market”. In a real free market, MS, Meta, Google would not have hundreds of billions of dollar to burn because competition would drive profit margins to a state of approaching zero. Zuck would not be able to burn $45 B on his weird and disgusting Metaverse Mii autosexuality fetish.

Not a fan of the leadership of China, but I genuinely do believe that one area that we can learn from them is how to deal with oligarchs.

Counter arguement: you need to do your own research/planning/applications and so on. There won’t always be an easy “all inclusive” path. But opportunities are there for those who are looking for them.

That being said, it would massively help to speak at least one other language fluently.

You’re also correct that it’s not easy from a resource perspective. But if people from much poorer countries can make it work, than so can people in the US.

Getting different perspectives from different circles instead of being migrated to one dominant website culture is a big part of why I haven’t moved to piefed, since it seems like that semi-forced centralization is part of their vision.

Have you used Piefed and its multi-community comment system? I am asking because from using it, I don’t the impression of “being migrated to one dominant website culture”.

Looks like some pretty solid improvements (I use piefed on a different account).

Looking forward to checking out the image upload functionality and the UI/UX improvements.

Post urls are now “friendly” since they include the community name and a snippet of the title instead of just a number

It’s good that the old style links aren’t broken.

This one of the great features of Piefed!

Because well written dystopian sci-fi is based on real human flaws (but projected into a speculative future).

I think the article is giving the oligarchs/criminals too much credit.

Let’s hope for the best, without dark ages, and who knows, perhaps we have novel tools too.

One example would be: Trans-Siberian Railway (1904)

Took 13 years to build.

Thanks.

Can’t say I agree though. I can’t think of any historical examples where a positive agenda in of itself made a difference.

One example would be industrialization at the end of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century. One could argue it was far more disruptive of pre-industrial society (railroads, telegraph, radio, mass production) than the information age is now.

Clearly industrialization enabled mass benefits in society, but it took WW1/WW2 and the rise of uncompromising, brutal revolutionary regimes for societies to come to terms with pros and cons of industrial society and find a middle path of sorts (until the next disruption).

Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that point in our times. That being said, the current oligarch regime comes off as even more self assured than the beneficiaries of early industrial society (gilded age oligarch in the US, Romanov dynasty in Tsarist russia).

The current batch of oligarchs has the benefit of hindsight and yet they is no end to their hubris with Bezos talking about millions living in space and comically stupid projects like data centres in orbit and The Simpsons-style “block the sun” schemes to address climate change.

Only option is to not use Americans products and services.

America cannot be trusted. At the end of the day the current US administration is a mere symptom, not the root cause.

As another poster mentioned, there is far more similarity between Obama and Trump than most Americans would like to admit.

No disrespect to sane Americans. It is a disaster for global democracy that America has de facto transitioned to a chauvinistic oligarchy.

So yes, we need a positive vision for AI so we can deal with these problems

I am genuinely curious why you think we need a positive vision for AI.

I say this as someone who regularly uses LLMs for work (more as a supplement to web searching) and uses “AI” in other areas as well (low resolution video upscaling). There are also many other very interesting use cases (often specialized) that tend to be less publicized than LLM related stuff.

I still don’t see why we need a positive vision for AI.

From my perspective, “AI” is a tool, it’s not inherently positive or negative. But as things stand right now, the industry is dominated by oligarchs and conmen types (although they of course don’t have a monopoly in this area). But since we don’t really have a way to reign in the oligarchs (i.e. make them take responsibility for their actions), the discussion around positive vision almost seems irrelevant. Let’s say we do have a positive vision for AI (I am not even necessarily opposed to such a vision), but my question would be, so what?

Perhaps we are just talking about different things. :)

P.S. FWIW, I read your replies in this thread.

That’s a fair point. I am just sharing my interpretation.

From the first time watching the movie in 2006 to a recent re-watch, I always got the impression that the eugenics piece was never meant to be taken seriously (or literally). If anything both parties were made to look rather silly in the intro (in their own way). Felt like more of a story setup.

There were definitely many critiques of US corporate culture (I was living in the US around that time after living in Europe and Asia) and the complacency of US society. The TV commercials/shows/ads, the Fox news show, the overboard consumerism, costco university, the Brawndo slogan. It made all of them look bad and stupid.

One could argue that an average guy solving all the worlds problems while the corporate types failed is a damning take on oligarchy.

The director, Mike Judge, didn’t emphasize the more sociopathic and dark elements of oligarchy, but the movie was meant to be a comedy.

Google, Apple, Meta it’s all the same to me. I don’t do fandom for oligarch conglomerates. I am not from North America.

In reality, I think you’re being deliberately obtuse because you want to defend Google’s business practices for some reason. You’re conflating the way Google collects sensitive user information for the purpose of advertising in every single one of its products, including from non-Google apps and webpages with some technicality around verbiage in a privacy policy, which you have not even cited yourself.

All right, all right! It’s all a big conspiracy to protect Alphabet and discredit poor little Tim Apple.

You got me partner. It’s all technicality in their privacy policy!

Some of the people in the society portrayed in the Minority Report movie seemed to be doing fine, but it was clear that a lot of people were also living in rather miserable conditions. Not to mention the brutal security services that reminded me of russia.

It’s been a while since I read the novella, but I vividly remember Spielberg’s adaption having a society that was much more flashy and sanitized. The world in the novella was a nihilistic, proto-cyberpunk world with 50s pulp space scifi motifs.