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The term "brainwashing" is so misleading and fear-baity here. Humans are gullible and can be convinced of falsehoods. You have just as much if not more "brainwashing" power than any chatbot. The only difference is that a chatbot can reach more people faster, but we can also inoculate ourselves to the effectiveness of AI by things like "media literacy" and "skepticism". If you know that an AI can be programmed to promote falsehoods (or otherwise fed falsehoods), you can perhaps double check sources that an AI uses to promote their claims. It's not brain control its just media baby

1. It's important to remember that having struggling poor people is expensive for the system. Emergency shelters, health issues that go untreated until they need emergency intervention, desperation crimes like theft (affecting policing and prisons), foster care, drug use intervention. These are all expenses that are reduced by a system like UBI. If you keep people healthy and fed, you can keep them peaceful and working and the program pays for itself.

2. I don't see the inflation effect as purely linear. Having $10 when things cost $10 is better than having $0 when things cost $5. There are thresholds that affect peoples ability to even engage with the market that you put your trust into. Also the market wants people to buy things, so it should welcome more people participating in it. And lets not forget that most of the price gouging over the past few years went straight to shareholder profits instead of increased supply costs, we can try to decentivize systems like that that profit off of economic crises.

> we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing

"letting markets do their thing" is contradictory to "fostering competition". Markets fundamentally drift towards consolidation. Source: the past sixty years. Markets do not fundamentally organically move towards progress. Often times the profitable thing is to pay workers shit wages and raise prices, and if you try to wait it out for a magical class of well financed competitors to come along and disrupt that status quo, millions of people will have been put into poverty in the interim.

Ah yes the old "banning things=bad" argument that doesn't offer alternatives to fixing the issues with AI. Just ignore the issues with environmental impact, plagiarism, CP and other non-consensual shit in the data sets, scamming capabilities! All the groups asking for regulation here have **funding** and that means they are evil but we are good for using this tool that is massively subsidized by megacorps that have a vested interest in this market.

In my lifetime school stopped being about teaching life skills and started being about college prep. I never had home ec, wood shop, auto shop, any life skill class. Hell even drivers ed was privatized in my town. I understand that these programs are expensive to keep running but that slack was not picked up by other community resources like community colleges. (theres also a lot to be said about the stigmatization of community college and adult education courses)

The decline in public funding of education and public transit in my lifetime have gotten us to this point

you know all this shit is connected right? the rich in America exploit labor to accumulate profit -> funnel that shit into investments to passively increase their income -> investment firms squeeze their controlled companies to generate more profit to increase shareholder value -> companies outsource labor to the 3rd world to reduce costs and give savings to shareholders -> those foreign businesses exploit their workers to a greater degree because there is less/none regulation -> people in other countries get paid $1 a day

Fighting corporate greed in the US is in effect fighting for the rights of laborers internationally that are negatively affected by American business interests. No one who fights for this kind of change does so for selfish reasons, it's for all of us.

if your opinion is that some people make millions a day and some people make $1 a day and thats just life and we shouldnt try to change that, I think you are fundamentally lost.

Also consider: where do the billionaires in the US get the resources to fuel their empires? Do they get their cobalt from slave labor mines in the Congo? Do you think maybe there is some kind of connection between corporate greed in America and people on the other side of the world making $1/day or less?

"a bad thing happens somewhere in the world therefore you shouldn't complain"

imagine if i told you that i think everyone deserves to make a wage that allows them to thrive and have stability.

Also consider that A) things are more expensive here and B) our economy is debt based and many people with homes and cars in the US have negative income after expenses, just because aesthetically our poverty looks different, it doesn't mean that it's good. It's not comparable.

idk what their profit structure or founding story is, but the poison pill for every company is investment capital. The second you take VC money you are beholden to someone other than your coworkers and clients. If you can get off the ground and become sustainable on sales alone, you are golden. Stability is possible but the problem is that most VCs demand 10x return, not 1.25x return.

> It implies you are not living in a communist society, and therefore allowed a measure of control over your own life

OK red scare calm down. I think you overestimate how much control capitalism gives you. Criticizing the economy does not make you a commie. If you wanna lay down and accept oligarchy because you are afraid of communism be my guest, but I would highly suggest you fight for slightly better circumstances for yourself and your neighbors.

> STOP GIVING THEM MONEY If oligarchy was limited to Bezos, Zuck, and Musk that would be easy! But billionaires kind of own everything? Our food supply is controlled by a handful of megacorps, our communication network is administered by a few others, real estate is a game for giant investment groups, health care is a fucking joke... It's impossible to elect to not participate in the economy, or at least its impractical for everyone to live off the grid.

Listen I know you think that communism means the goberment controls everything (it doesnt), but at least I can vote for my gov reps. I don't get a fucking vote when Blue Cross Blue Shield is deciding where I can go to the hospital.

actually no, I don't think anyone should look at the wealth spread in the US and think that it's normal or good. It's objectively dangerous and undemocratic. If someone can earn millions a day from passive investment but someone who actually provides meaningful goods and services day-to-day barely makes 50k a year, I think we have totally misunderstood as a society what to value and how to distribute resources

only if you are content with the way the US economy works, which requires wearing some pretty large blinders

You shouldn't just lazily lay down and accept the negatives of changes like this, you'll just create a techno-oligarchy. You should fight for change to be slow and deliberate to protect your neighbors instead of taking their floor.

If your income is $0 it doesn't matter if prices go down by 20%. When the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" economy is designed to be sink or swim people are gonna drown when shit like this happens. It's not about "luddites are forcing us to do manual labor", it's "corporate greed is destroying our communities". If you want automation you should be fighting for things like Universal Healthcare and a UBI so people can survive periods of change.

I agree with you that generally people who complain about assistive devices do not consider any form of disability in their analysis. But the way that the consumer tech industry is shaped makes selling assistive devices really hard. Investors only want to invest in things that will be the next iPhone which makes actual assistive tech a really tough industry because the market is too small. So companies broaden try to broaden their reach but in order to do that they sacrifice the resilience, durability, reliability that those under-served communities really need. Most abled people can handle the 80% accuracy of a voice assistant, but for someone who needs an assistive device, that 20% failure rate can be brutal. The bar is so much higher to help those communities, and most companies wont bother.

Basically, if you want to make a medical assistive device, you kind of have to be all in on it, instead of trying to convince everyone that your device is the future of human-computer interaction (because its probably not and you'll just forget and ignore those communities)