It does seem bizarre that major AI development (and autonomous robot development) hasn't been nationalised yet and treaties drafted up around producing it. Commercial incentives just seem totally at odds with the public good when it comes to controlling and regulating something like this.
Even if not for the sake of avoiding a mitigable disaster, there's a huge benefit in simply pacing development so as to not completely freak out society as they stare down the barrel of mass job market changes without time to adapt or prepare. Nobody wants to live in a world where they might wake up in a month and find their entire industry has been automated overnight.
We've tackled much bigger global issues successfully in the past and the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line. It seems like the biggest issue is belief in the right of governments to govern.
> the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line
The US absolutely could coerce the rest of the West in the short term, but everything that's happened in the last decade calls the long-term future of Atlanticism into serious question and such action would accelerate this process I think. If coordination came as an order from Uncle Sam, it would be seen not as a legitimate act of ensuring collective safety but as mere technological imperialism on America's part.
It's not exactly trained on a neutral set of data. Engagement algorithms have ensured that a good chunk of content on the web these days is inflammatory and skewed towards the extreme (in fact in the last few months a good portion of the world has actually deemed it illegal for kids to consume because this content is so damaging to a developing brain).
The trick I started using for those infinite scroll apps (that are basically digital crack) is that I made a pact that I had to close the app the moment something appeared that was obviously trying to make me angry, upset or indignant.
It was initially an attempt to train the algorithms away from emotionally exploitation, but for the most part that was never fixed while my screen time dropped to almost zero.
As an upside I'm now also much more aware when a post is trying to manipulate my emotions, and I've come to realise how a majority of reddit posts are designed to undermine basic faith in society and your fellow humans. Horrifying to think about the implications, but glad I at least have a personal handle on it now.
This is what killed Gemini for me. The model might well be great, but the ecosystem Google has built around them is a confusing maze of not-quite-there products.
As a hobbyist teen I built my own itunes clone for PC from scratch and remember getting so excited when Apple posted a job for someone to port iTunes officially.
I remember getting so excited, then depressed when I realised a hobbyist teenager could never compete with the people Apple would have applying. Later seeing how bizarrely bloated iTunes for PC turned out, guess I probably could have.
Australia's competition watchdog sued Google over this about 10 years ago, and lost the case on appeal. Google's winning argument was that it was the ad buyers that were responsible for breaking the law, not Google who were just acting as a conduit.
I'm not really convinced these kinds of "we're just the platform" arguments stack up that well anymore when we see the harm these kinds of unregulated platforms have done to society. Unfortunately though the precedent is already set, so it will be fairly had to backtrack.
In the case of sharing a link I have to remember/find where it is in each app, likely scroll through a long list of messaging (and for some reason non-messaging apps) to find the correct app, select the contact, and then pray that the link sent actually works for them and contains the correct information I'm seeing (very often the link will actually direct them to a web version of the app I'm using, then put a modal popup in front of the information asking them to use the app, then either send them to the app store, or send them to the app but strip out the actual information I linked and send them to a blank map).
Screenshots are clunky and unideal, but at least they're fast and I know that they don't fail or break or send the wrong info to my contact.
If it were a one off message, this wouldn't be an issue, but if you zoom out on the issue and see you're sending up to a hundred messages a day, points of failure become major life frictions and you're trained out of using things like links in messaging apps.
There needs to be some kind of "murphy's law" for this style of comment. "For any comment on the internet where someone points out an issue they've encountered with technology, there will inevitably be a reply from someone else sharing that they haven't personally experienced it."
Confidently wrong summaries are the bane of Google search, and unfortunately I'm finding the AI seems to bleed into the actual search results too now, often turning up pages that back up what the summary is (wrongly) suggesting instead of surfacing actually relevant results for what I'm asking.
Even if not for the sake of avoiding a mitigable disaster, there's a huge benefit in simply pacing development so as to not completely freak out society as they stare down the barrel of mass job market changes without time to adapt or prepare. Nobody wants to live in a world where they might wake up in a month and find their entire industry has been automated overnight.
We've tackled much bigger global issues successfully in the past and the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line. It seems like the biggest issue is belief in the right of governments to govern.
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