Nice, Tim Schafer is someone whose writing I really admire, if you haven't checked it out yet Double Fine (the studio he leads) documented the entire (7 year!) development cycle of Psychonauts 2 in a 32 episode documentary series, and it in my opinion one of the best documentaries ever made. It covers a lot of cool stuff, like Covid, them getting acquired by Microsoft, big project leadership struggles. It's long as hell but it is really worth your time if you have an interest in creative work in large teams.
They are currently doing a company wide gamejam/game idea incubation thing, after surviving Microsoft undoing the acquisition and the same Documentary crew is doing a doc about that (they did a kickstarter campaign to fund it)
I sort of agree, and i think strengtening IP Law is probably not great. But I do think it's very fucked that building generative ai is only possible by taking the works of countless artists and craftspeople and then the model produced from that data immediately gets deployed to destroy the careers of the people whose, work was vital to it being created, without compensation for them, while making a few evil nerds richer than god. I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.
> I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s start with redistributing the profits from AI companies and then move on to all profits from all companies because the logic is the same.
Nope. You are making one or both of these mistakes. (1) Overlooking that the same logic can lead to different outcomes depending on the premises to which the logic is applied. (2) Overlooking that real life is analog, not digital, and so thinking the premises are the same when they are not.
The targeted outcome is the redistribution of wealth away from the capital class to the working class. Capitalist exploitation of labor was analog to begin with, and the same premise does apply: the capital class absorbs the fruits of labor, training, and education that is performed by the masses in order to enrich themselves. The capital class owes a tremendous debt to society and if they don't plan on paying we should plan to seize it.
The exploitation of labor has has a tremendous negative impact on the environment and the health of humans. Recall that it took dragging the factory bosses from their and beating them to death to get an 8 hour work day, a weekend, and restrictions on child labor.
We can do it the easy way —- government redistribution of excess profits — or we can do it the hard way. I suspect the people in charge won’t realize they could have taken the easy way until it’s too late.
Pretty sure we had to sanction/assassinate/goad into self-destructive military campaigns the Red Terror to beat it. And even then, the major survivor still beat us to cyberpunk dystopia (the cool one with hologram skyscrapers, not the uncool one with decaying suburbs).
Accountability, that's the liability everyone seems to have forgotten in our LLM-driven era. You can close your eyes as much you want during your sessions with Claude or whatever, at the end of the day, only a human can be held accountable.
Not too hopeful here as we see the major labs continuously break rules and are not held accountable for anything. Accountability in general is on a major decline, in case no one has noticed.
I didn't even mention anything about AI, so no reason to bring it into this. Lawyers or not, it signals to other companies and society in general that repercussions are at least less severe now, or in some cases non-existent.
That's just it, though: we don't hold humans accountable.
Incorporation is a way to split a human's financial assets from the company they run so that they don't lose everything when the company is successfully sued. Corporate governance boards often have the C-suite executives they're meant to govern on the board. The average person does not have the financial resources needed to take on most companies in court, no matter how justified the suit might be. Companies force arbitration clauses in license agreements at will. Companies like Meta settle with the government for pennies on the dollar in massive lawsuits.
Effectively, at the scale many tech companies work at, there is no effective legal way to hold the company accountable.
If you use this as a (legal/registered) business, it will be that legal business entity that is responsible. If that business want's to blame the software, it can do so and go after the makers of the software, but that remains a matter between that business and its "supplier". It won't absolve the business for whatever damage it does downstream.
Running this as an individual, without the legal shielding a business typically gives you against being prosecuted on personal title, seriously risky. There will no doubt be "bros" that will do it anyway and flaunt all they've achieved with that. But they might be just one glitch away from going to jail (if not for running a business without a registration, which in many jurisdictions is illegal by itself).
In many countries directors can be held responsible a lot of things if they are negligent. For example, in UK law keeping trading after you should have known a company was unable to meet its liabilities can make directors responsible for its debts. A director might well be negligent if they failed to adequately check that an AI was not doing anything dangerous.
Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:
worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.
> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.
my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.
I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.
Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.
Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.
Remember that Chinese CEO that was executed for corruption & selling tainted baby milk powder [1]
I think these guys would improve their behavior if their actual life was on the line instead of that only being true in their less-wrong thought experiments.
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