“White” is an ever-moving target, dancing on the whims of whether the suit-and-tie-wearing white guy thinks he can get you to build him a railroad.

So, the answer is yes and no.

Who orchestrated it and who sent who to carry it out?

And was it a lucky coincidence? Were witches involved to spell the assassination out in scary-looking sticks?

You know that some people distantly benefiting from something doesn’t mean that they orchestrated it, right?

Trump immediately began calling for war on the left

Yeah, because the right knows not to waste a tragedy.

But also, they were already doing that. They’ve been calling for war on the left, like, since before Trump took the presidency again. Kirk has barely upped the temperature from the insane shit they were saying a month ago.

I don’t see how this is much different from the sycophancy “error” OpenAI built into its machine to drive user retention.

If a meth user is looking for reasons to keep using, then a yes-man AI system biased toward agreeing with them will give them reasons.

Honestly, it’s much scarier than meth addiction; you could reasonably argue the meth user should pull up their bootstraps and simply refuse to use the sycophantic AI.

But what about flat-earthers? What about Q-Anon? These are not people looking for the treatment of their mental illness, and a sycophantic AI will tell them “You’re on the right track. It’s freedom fighters like you this country needs. NASA doesn’t want people to know about this.”

I will admit that, unlike crypto, AI is technically capable of being useful, but its uses are for problems we have created for ourselves.

– “It can summarize large bodies of text.”
What are you reading these large bodies of text for? We can encourage people to just… write less, you know.

– “It’s a brainstorming tool.”
There are other brainstorming tools. Creatives have been doing this for decades.

– “It’s good for searching.”
Google was good for searching until they sabotaged their own service. In fact, google was even better for searching before SEO began rotting it from within.

– “It’s a good conversationalist.”
It is… not a real person. I unironically cannot think of anything sadder than this sentiment. What happened to our town squares? Why is there nowhere for you to go and hang out with real, flesh and blood people anymore?

– “Well, it’s good for learning languages.”
Other people are good for learning languages. And, I’m not gonna lie, if you’re too socially anxious to make mistakes in front of your language coach, I… kinda think that’s some shit you gotta work out for yourself.

– “It can do the work of 10 or 20 people, empowering the people who use it.”
Well, the solution is in the text. Just have the 10 or 20 people do that work. They would, for now, do a better job anyway.

And, it’s not actually true that we will always and forever have meaningful things for our population of 8 billion people to work on. If those 10 or 20 people displaced have nowhere to go, what is the point of displacing them? Is google displacing people so they can live work-free lives, subsisting on their monthly UBI payments? No. Of course they’re not.

I’m not arguing that people can’t find a use for it; all of the above points are uses for it.

I am arguing that 1) it’s kind of redundant, and 2) it isn’t worth its shortcomings.

AI is enabling tech companies to build a centralized—I know lemmy loves that word—monopoly on where people get their information from (“speaking of white genocide, did you know that Africa is trying to suppress…”).

AI will enable Palantir to combine your government and social media data to measure how likely you are to, say, join a union, and then put that into an employee risk assessment profile that will prevent you from ever getting a job again. Good luck organizing a resistance when the AI agent on your phone is monitoring every word you say, whether your screen is locked or not.

In the same way that fossil fuels have allowed us to build cars and planes and boats that let us travel much farther and faster than we ever could before, but which will also bury an unimaginable number of dead in salt and silt as global temperatures rise: there are costs to this technology.