rmah

Those sort of tactics seem to come from the belief that "awareness" is an important precursor to socio-political change. Which, I guess is technically true. But I agree that this particular sort of awareness building is detrimental to their stated cause.

Some seem to sincerely believe that renewed immigration law enforcement is morally evil.

I'm not sure why since it was enforced this way for decades before except for a few years recently. Now, I think that one can argue that ICE is overly aggressive, that it casts too wide a net, that too many mistakes are made, that it should focus on specific violations instead, etc. But these are arguments that can be made for any law enforcement agency, and have been for over 100 years in the USA. Sometimes, IMO, they were even justified.

That said, however, it also seems that many have latched onto ICE enforcement actions as a bell-weather pre-cursor to additional actions that will lead to a dystopian outcome. Or is in the process of doing so as we speak.

Thus, if one believes this to be true, then one can see why actions taken to fight/oppose/slow down the process can be viewed in a morally good light and something to be celebrated.

The "we're all a big family" narrative is a psychological ploy to try to exploit the need by most people to feel like they belong to some group. This need is deeply interwoven into our psyche. And as more traditional structures of society (extended family, churches, social clubs, etc) erode, it leaves a void that many cannot really understand. IMO, this particular message is almost never true.

Company "mission statements" and such are a similar tactic. Though I think it's a bit less cynical, because the company leadership sometimes (rarely IMO) believes in the mission to a minor degree.

"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back." <= this was never the case. The pitch is that AI will either augment people to make them much much more productive or replace them altogether.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Of course heat wave deaths and being shot is not the same.

That's not really how corruption in the US works.

We do know the consequences. Wealthier nations have essentially eliminated 99%+ of the population of the few species of disease carrying mosquitoes in many broad areas. The effect on the ecosystem was not noticeable. Using cheaper methods to help poorer areas will save 10's of millions of lives and eliminate billions of cases of disease. It's overwhelmingly worth it even if it caused ecological harm. To not do this is, to even fight against doing it is, IMO, immoral.

The impact would be saving the lives of thousands of people in the short term and millions of people in the long term.

Even if it is somehow true that mosquitoes play an important part of some ecosystems, to me, it's worth the ecological damage to save the lives of millions of men, women and children in the future and prevent the suffering millions more.

Call me crazy if you want.

According to their numbers the TRU rate of unemployment between 2022 and 2026 is the lowest it's been in 30 years.

I also get an error:

    Requested allocation size (41967616) is smaller than the image requires (42778624).
    at ImportMemory (../../third_party/dawn/src/dawn/native/vulkan/external_memory/MemoryServiceImplementationOpaqueFD.cpp:132)

using Chromium on an old video card GTX 1070 with 32GB RAM, Fedora 44 KDE Plasma 4.7. Don't know if it matters but monitor scaling is set to 150%

I think that's pretty blatantly obvious there are other ways to live. After all, there are still millions of people surviving on subsistence agriculture in fairly primitive conditions. Still people leading mostly-pastoral lifestyles herding animals. Still millions living in small isolated villages with few modern amenities. Still millions of people living in crowded dirty cities and working in dangerous factories for long hours the way people did in London of the late 1800's. And everything in between. It's funny how so few people voluntarily leave the wealth post-industrial regions to live in any of those, eh?

That reminds me of another novel called "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson where everyone has a molecular assembler (i.e. nanotech or 3D printers on steroids) in their home. Putting aside the grey goo gone wild tropes, one thing that I suspect was realistic about the novel was that there were still rich people and poor people. Many people were still very unhappy and dissatisfied. Still the criminals and the corrupt.

You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness. IMO, past a certain point, happiness is more a function of society, family, status, and perhaps even purpose. Personally, I don't think the top three layers of Maslow's Hierarchy are on top of each other, but an interdependent mix. Even so, material wealth certainly makes life more comfy :-)

I'm sure their AI can simulate bad executives very effectively. Good ones, not so much. Humorously, the set of agents don't include an AI CEO, just the execs underneath the CEO. Someone must set the goals, after all and current LLM's have no agency (yet... thank the gods). Finally, the tasks their LLM agents can supposedly do are more the tasks that the executive's staff handles, not the executive themselves. Unless it's a smaller company, I guess.