stateofinquiry

It seems you are suggesting that if a private corporation (a foreign one at that) is large enough it should ignore the law of the country its operating in. I don't think you will like the consequences of such a situation, and will charitably assume you have just not thought your message through for even a second before posting it.

PS: If you think the British gov is authoritarian.. well, you might not know what the term means and/or anything about the spectrum of governments operating today or in the past.

My opinion and based on my observations: The recent track record with courts, prosecutors, and lawmakers keeping social media companies accountable is a relevant case and does not encourage me. It has taken a long time (decade +) for society to recognize the harms and finally start holding some to (partial) account. If you want an older precedent, the tobacco companies were able to dodge liability for multiple decades after knowing the harms from use of their products.

So, your question is spot on- I think the speed will be an issue. On resilience, I am more optimistic.

The old quote, "The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind very fine" (as well as I can remember it) seems to apply. I expect lawsuits to start landing in the coming years.

Thank you! That sentence also jumped out to me as the solution: Apply civil and criminal liability to the creator and/or operator of these agents using the laws we already have. "Escaped containment and hacked another company's database" = Individuals who created the models and those who set them to work are charged and put on trial for the hacking. Just like if a human had done it by hand. Someone must be liable, and it should not be the model- because the model is not a person.

If this is done systematically (i.e. in jurisdictions across the world) I believe the problems will be solved in short order; we won't have to mandate what sort of training is "allowed" or not, "safe" or not. The creators and users will sort these themselves, as their incentives will be properly aligned (i.e. they are liable for what the agent does). I am confident that this approach would see a great blooming of very trustworthy AI models.

> the EU a de facto open air prison for him.

de facto a person can take a train into Switzerland from the EU (France, for example) with no border control. Or arrive by car. Once in Switzerland flights out are possible for a Swiss citizen. So I believe your statement is untrue.

Probably the fact that most of the readership of the article and this site were alive for the former but not the latter. One could equally pin the rise of Joe McCarthy as the moment America started its move to "autocracy". Or when Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans. Or the civil war. Or the Mexican-American war. In fact, the struggle is constant (as mentioned downthread).

Yup. I have not tried using a non-GoogleAndroid or iOS smartphone, but what you describe perfectly reflects what I experienced when I went started to work for a large employer 16 y ago. I had been using Linux as my main OS on desktops and mobile computers for at least 15 y by then. Slowly the grind of hacking my system to access the VPN, check email on their Exchange server, open MS Word docs.. it all pushed me to MacOS from about 2015 - 2021. Eventually I could not abide by Apple's incompatible hold on my data, Gatekeeper (I really hate the concept that they must approve software I want to run on my own hardware) and the unrepairability of their machines.. so I am now on Win 11. Right now, considering the trade offs, I think this is the best choice. I see a lot of people extolling Linux lately, so maybe it is time to try going back.

Back OT, smartphones were always less open than the general purpose computers of yore. And it looks like they are increasingly a requirement for participating in many societies. In general I don't find this a good thing, but have little faith that regulators will 'solve' is because they have their own pitfalls (recent examples from EU: age verification and chat control).

I did switch from MacOS to MS Windows in 2023, after being on MacOS from 2015 (and various Linux distros between about 2000 and 2015; before that, Win98 and earlier versions, so help me God).

I did not think anyone would be interested in reading about any of this, and reading the article reinforces my hypothesis.

Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something that users have to learn to use (memorizing keybindings, for example), might go the way of the punch card.

More like Star Trek, we would just ask "computer" to do things, and its machinations (and "software") will be invisible to us. We would just have output to deal with.

I think this would mean a lot of things. I'm sure I can't fathom all of the implications, but it sure makes me feel old! Interesting times ahead.

I don't see mention of this in the discussion, so I will add: I think people also don't close tabs. And probably these LI tabs have been up for a long time. Maybe weeks or months.

I completely exit my web browser(s) at least 1x per day, and use bookmarks to get back to pages I need. As a result, I don't have issues with memory leaks or unbounded growth of RAM use. For me, its just the "proper" way to use a program like a web browser, but I'm old enough to be from the era that restarting programs and the OS could fix issues. I recognize that most people feel it is unreasonable to quit the browser, pretty much ever.

"Clear issues caused by a seemingly bright idea, but the idea still pushed forward no matter what." .. well put. It occurs to me that this is the case on the HW front with Apple as well. I remember the butterfly keyboard, the notch, everything glued in and unservicable, the removal of ports like magsafe, ethernet, USB-A... well, at least some of the HW mis-steps have been reversed. We see some movement in that direction from the later versions of Tahoe.

Probably. Question is, who will be accountable for the bot behavior? Might be the company providing them, might be the user who sent them off unsupervised, maybe both. The worrying thing for many of us humans is not that a personal attack appeared in a blog post (we have that all the time!) its that it was authored and published by an entity that might be unaccountable. This must change.