If youtube is still pushing racist and alt right content on to people, then they can get fucked. Why should we let some recommender system controlled by a private corporation have this much influence American culture and politics??

Why is it that these sorts of people who claim that AI is sentient are always trying to get copyright rights? If an AI was truly sentient, I feel like it'd want, like, you know, rights. Not the ability for its owner to profit off of a cool stable diffusion generation that he generated that one time.

Not to mention that you can coerce a language model to say whatever you want, with the right prompts and context. So there's not really a sense in which you can say it has any measurable will. So it's quite weird to claim to speak for one.

Personally, I find a lot of Peter Singer's arguments to be pretty questionable. As for some of the ones you've mentioned:

For one, killing humans, no matter how humanely the means, is seen by most to be an act of cruelty. I do not want to be killed in my sleep, so why is it okay to assume that animals would be okay with it? While he is a utilitarian and doesn't believe in rights, killing a sentient being seems to me to have much greater negative utility than the positive utility of the enjoyment of eating a chicken.

Also, farming animals for slaughter will always be destructive towards habitats and native species. Even if broiler chickens were kept alive for their natural lifespan of 3-7 years instead of 8 weeks to alleviate any kind of ethical issue with farming them, there is still an opportunity and environmental cost to farming chickens. We could use that land for to cultivate native species and wildlife, or for growing more nutritious and varied crops for people to eat, yet instead we continue to raze the amazon rainforest to make more land for raising farm animals and growing feed. De-densification of farms would only make the demand for farmland even greater than it already is.

Finally, the de-densification of farms would mean a significant increase in the costs of mear production. We'd be pricing lower income groups out of eating meat, while allowing middle- and upper-class folks to carry on consuming animal products as usual. We should not place the burdens of societal progress on the lower class.

Sam Altman is a part of it too, as much as he likes to pretend he's not.

Section 3a of the bill is the part that would be used to target LGBTQ content.

Sections 4 talks about adding better parental controls which would give general statistics about what their kids are doing online, without parents being able to see/helicopter in on exaxrlt what their kids were looking at. It also would force sites to give children safe defaults when they create a profile, including the ability to disable personalized recommendations, placing limitations on dark patterns designed to manipulate children to stay on platforms for longer, making their information private by default, and limiting others' ability to find and message them without the consent of children. Notably, these settings would all be optional, but enabled by default for children/users suspected to be children.

I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They're the types of settings that I'd prefer to use on my online accounts, at least. However, the bad outweighs the good here, and the content in section 3a is completely unacceptable.

Funnily enough, I had to read through the bill twice, and only caught on to how bad section 3a was on my second time reading it.

I tried for a while to make those small changes, but I always found it too hard to do, until I finally just decided to cut out all animal products one night, and I never really went back.

I think the difference was how I framed it, mentally. I always saw it as an act of willpower to not eat animal products, like I have to overcome my cravings in the same way I would if I was cutting calories. But quitting animal products altogether allowed me to frame it differently for myself -- instead of telling myself "I shouldn't eat this", I can just say "I don't eat this." Like, it's not on the table as something I have to consider. I don't even have to recognize animal products as food.

Maybe if you cut things out one at a time you could do a similar thing. Though one problem is that it's a series of changes and commitments you have to make, instead of just one thing. I feel like that could be harder, depending on who you are.

Even if you accept the premise that so-called ethically raised meat is ethical, there's just not enough land to farm meat at the scale which people in developed countries demand it, unless it's factory farmed. Ethically farmed, free range animals require much more space than caged up factory farmed animals, and the grass they feed on requires yet more land.

That means that there's a limit on the supply, so I'm pretty sure that if someone tries to solve the whole animal rights issue by buying ethical meat, they'll only push the ethical dilemma on to someone poorer than them (the one who would be priced out, due to the increased demand). That person would then have to be the one to make the decision of whether to go vegan or to buy factory farmed meat.

Admittedly, I could be wrong about this? But I'm pretty sure that increasing land use of meat, whether by regulation or economic demand, would necessarily lead to increased prices, so I don't see how it possibly wouldn't just shift the problem on to the less wealthy.

Describing vegans as making major dietary changes because they "saw one video" is a pretty dishonest interpretation. Rigorously sticking to a vegan diet can be fairly difficult, and requires you to be very aware of exactly what you're eating -- including innocuous seeming things like food dyes and white sugar, which can often be made of animal products. To me, that doesn't read as impulsive, but instead disciplined.

Furthermore, while the decision to switch to going vegan could theoretically sometimes be done on impulse, one still has to make the decision every single day. It's not just a decision you make and it's done, it's one you must always choose to continue to make. A vegan has to decide to continue to be vegan every day, likely while under scrutiny of themself and others.

He co-invented PDF in '91. His PhD thesis, referenced in the summary, is a solution to the hidden line problem in computer graphics.

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and read the full text of the bill. After reading it, I'm pretty sure this is the controversial part:

SEC. 3. DUTY OF CARE. (a) Prevention Of Harm To Minors.—A covered platform shall act in the best interests of a user that the platform knows or reasonably should know is a minor by taking reasonable measures in its design and operation of products and services to prevent and mitigate the following:

(1) Consistent with evidence-informed medical information, the following mental health disorders: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.

The sorts of actions that a platform would be expected to take aren't specified anywhere, as far as I can tell, nor is the scope of what the platform would be expected to moderate. Does "operation of products and services" include the recommender systems? If so, I could see someone using this language to argue that showing LGBTQ content to children promotes mental health disorders, and so it shouldn't be recommended to them. They'd still be able to see it if they searched for it, but I don't think that makes it any better.

Also, in section 9, they talked about forming a committee to investigate the practicality of building age verification into hardware and/or the operating system of consumer devices. That seems like an invasion of privacy.

Reading through the rest of it, though, a lot of it did seem reasonable. For example, it would make it so that sites would have to put children on safe default options. That includes things like having their personal information be private, turning off addictive features designed to maximize engagement, and allowing kids to opt out of personalized recommendations. Those would be good changes, in my opinion.

If it wasn't for those couple of sections, the bill would probably be fine, so maybe that's why it's got bipartisan support. But right now, the bad seems like it outweighs the good, so we should probably start calling our lawmakers if the bill continues to gain traction.

apologies for the wall of text, just wanted to get to the bottom of it for myself. you can read the full text here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text

I am one of those people who's pretty concerned about AI, but not cause of the singularity thing. (the singularity hypothesis seems kinda silly to me)

I'm mostly concerned about the stuff that billionaires are gonna do with AI to screw us over, and the ways that it'll be used as a political tool, like to spread misinformation and such.

I don't really think this is fundamentally different from how it's always been. Food and drink has always had branding, and I don't see how gay water is truly that much different from any other branding. The only difference I see is that republicans won't stop complaining about it