anarchiddy

Mr Beast is the quintessential example of someone who defines themselves by their unfathomable success, attributing it to their unique work-ethic and dedication, and then collapses under the weight of their impossibly large ego

I imagine the next deflection is something like 'but china has the second largest number of billionares', but as soon as you sort that list by per-capita it suddenly tells a very different story.

People are joking(?) about someone shooting back at one of these ICE raids, but i honestly do not see any other viable choices - it really seems to be between going with ICE to a concentration camp or dying in a firefight and taking a few pigs with ypu

I'll never understand people who insist China is 'State Capitalism' but Nordic countries are ideal socialism, somehow.

Sure, but Abigail wasn't really advocating against transhumanism or technology generally... The critique of that video is that technology isn't really the focus of the disagreement between transhuminism and anti-transhumanism, but rather the 'dressing' around a deeper phenomenological belief (for transhumanists it's the belief that technology will save us from the inequity and suffering created under capitalism, and for anti-transhumanists it's the belief that technology and progress will subvert the 'natural' order of things and we must reject it in favor of tradition). Both arguments distract from what is arguably the more pressing issue - namely that technology does nothing to correct the contradictions of capital and it may even work to accelerate its collapse.

I would really enjoy a discussion about how AI might shape our experience as humans - and how that might be good or bad depending - but instead we're stuck in this other conversation about how AI might save us from the toils of labor (despite centuries of technological progress having never brought us any closer to liberation) vs how it might be a Trojan horse and we need to return to a pre-AI existence.

It might be more productive for you to argue the case for why the effects or harm you're pointing to are somehow 'inherent' to AI itself and not symptoms of capitalism exacerbated by AI.

AI is also just hazardous by its very nature

I think the point is that there's nothing hazardous inherent in its nature, and pointing to the problematic uses under capitalism isn't any more a description of 'its nature' than is pointing to an ass a description of a chair's nature.

AI is a tool, just like any other, and the harm caused by that tool is largely defined by how it's used and by who.

There's no doubt that LLM's and other generative models are disruptive, but suggesting that they are inherently harmful assumes that the things and systems they are disrupting aren't themselves harmful.

Most of what you're pointing to as harm caused by AI is far more attributable to the systems it exists in (including and especially capitalism) and not the models themselves. The only issue that I can see with AI inherently is its energy demand - but if we're looking at energy consumption broadly then we'd be forced to look at the energy consumption of capitalism and consumerism under capitalism, too.

I imagine the sentiment here would be wildly different if we were scrutinizing the energy demand of gaming on a modern GPU.

The degree to which liberal democracy 'works' is dependent on the health of capital

The more capital fails, the greater chance democracy slips into populism because capital can no longer address the needs of the people and sustain its infinite growth. Populism either leans left (redistribution of capital towards labor) or it leans right (consolidation of capital toward an 'in' group to the exclusion of the out groups), but once capital has failed there's really no returning to liberal democracy*.

*edit - until capital re-balances, but will trend toward collapse again

POSIWID

I made a ven-diagram to help explain

Damn, shoulda actually looked.

Our domestic piss beer is more diversified than I thought. Heineken actually surprises me - it used to be my dad's favorite beer before he stopped buying it out of protest. I always thought it was because AB Inbev bought it, but maybe he just really hates the Dutch idk

I don't think they're being downvoted for 'actually acting on something', they're being downvoted for sneering at the way other people are expressing their anger online.

Idk where libs get this delusion that they're the only ones online doing things in the real world - the rest of us just prefer to keep our irl activities separate and keep the rage posting on the forums.

Those people are more likely to participate in an uprising than the liberals who believe voting is the only thing that matters.

It doesn't take 90M people to blow up a pipeline.