What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.

Depending on the source, Wall Street is somewhere between 3 and 25 feet above sea level. It wouldn’t take much to dampen the market’s spirit. :-)

It isn’t glamorous and it doesn’t grab headlines, but that is how these problems get fixed.

Making to tomorrow is sometimes not a small undertaking.

Not to far. Thanks for letting me know about it.

I certainly won’t disagree with that.

I do understand. I am constantly fighting that myself. For me it’s an aspirational statement, not necessarily one I always manage to live.

Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.

Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.

This could be considered a trojan.

I love the idea!

The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.

The sad thing is that the corporate sociopaths who made the bad decisions all made huge amounts of money doing it. The fact that they destroyed the company means nothing to them. And it will not mean anything to the next corporations that hire those same people as executives.

The right wing has been actively working to undermine our educational system since the early 80’s. A poorly educated populace, particularly one without critical thinking skills, is much easier to manipulate. After four decades of underfunding, restrictive policies, and anti-intellectual propaganda, those efforts are really paying off.

Newt Gingrich and his co-conspirators have been waging war against the people of this country since Reagan was elected. And they are now dangerously close to winning that war.

I love this image, but you know that Clippy would be holding the gun sideways, gangster style.

The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.

I’ve just been looking for something to replace One Note. The timing of this announcement worked out really well for me. :-)

Thanks!

Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.

Thank you! That was very useful.

Dell did some non-standard trickery to allow more than 100W charging through a USB C connector. If it’s one of those laptops it will only charge over 100W with a Dell USB charger.

I’ve been using Nova for a very long time. It has saved me all kinds of annoyance as I’ve switched phone brands and OS versions, since my basic UI has remained consistent.

Unless it actually takes a dive in quality, I will continue to use it, but this is disappointing news.