Observe how this amounts to crime. The platform has motive:
-newly single users attract more views
-newly single users are worth more to advertisers because they’re likely to spend on appearance, travel, new hobbies, and big ticket items formerly shared with a partner.
The platform also has opportunity because it has data on exactly what content has highest probability of nudging a particular user to break up. (Perhaps the “you are being abused by a narcissist” stuff others have mentioned works nicely.)
(See also Shoshanna Zuboff)
> What if a learning dataset simply has not enough info for a correct answer to have a greater weight than all the “con” noise?
Indeed. I wonder what happens as available training data shifts from purely human-generated (now) to largely AI-generated (soon).
Is this an information analogue to the “gray goo” doomsday that an uncontrolled self-replicating nano device could cause?
>can it answer “I don’t know this”
Such a fabulous question. This statement likely appears infrequently in the training data.
Curiosity killed the cat. We’ve developed disgust and taboos and physiological responses like vomiting to safeguard our interactions with living things that are small enough to eat.
Perhaps an advanced form of life/intelligence that has survived contact with various others would be guided by some form of wisdom/disgust/caution/discretion. It would not be surprising if they noticed little clues like our rapid deforestation, rising temperatures, shrinking ice caps, nuclear detonations… which would make us seem slovenly or likely to have “poor friendship skills.”
> think I’m burning out (home, kids, marriage, etc)
Do you think you could manage the job if there were no expectations on you outside the job? Could your partner get on board with you needing some time with very few home responsibilities (as it's best for the family in the long run)?
Can you find access to nature? For me, a couple of unstructured hours getting bored in a truly natural setting feels almost like a vacation.
Karezza could help create a generous, non-transactional vibe at home and help you maintain creative energy.
Art Against Despair is a book put together by The School of Life. It's arranged with one page of text for each image, so it's an easy serving size when you don't have much time or attention. These are not nice pictures of flowers but, for example, why it's worth spending some time gazing into one of Rothko's black canvases, and for that matter, the darkness inside one's own being.
One that Loeb has mentioned: the status quo 10-year plan involves searching exoplanets for oxygen, which could arise without life, and which organisms would not necessarily need or produce. Instead, Loeb thinks we ought to look for industrial pollutants. A positive result on that would be extremely interesting.
If the US hadn't dropped the ball on enforcing existing antitrust laws in the 80s and 90s, we wouldn't have to ask. Perhaps many more regular people would own productive enterprises, and wouldn't be looking to government to address inequality.
Now that both corporations and government are so big and intrusive that they're somewhere between a nuisance and prohibitive toward small-scale enterprise, we should at least think about ways to sic them on each other.
I am skeptical of the headlines touting medical mistakes as the No. 3 cause of death in the US. But to be fair, someone could put up a similar site listing thousands of people who have been harmed under conventional medical care.
Your site doesn't provide enough info to compare the rate of harm. For mild ailments, which is what I assumed OP was speaking of, homeopathic treatments might have a lower rate of harm.
Iatrogenesis is a possibility with any health care. And, to give your link credit, homeopathy certainly sounds like a dangerous route for serious conditions.
"The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internists wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning."
- Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell
(Among other achievements, he was dean of Yale Medical School and president of Sloan-Kettering. This collection of essays was published in 1974 and is absolutely prescient and fascinating - he offers profound thoughts on the nature of science, computing, and medicine that have stood the test of time astonishingly well.)
Kahneman and Harari also discussed how the shift to agriculture, while a great step forward for humanity as a collective group, was a major bummer for the individual. (Much more interesting and healthier to be a hunter-gatherer than a serf.)
On people becoming superfluous to the market and the state as machine intelligence progresses:
"... [in the future, work no longer exists for] most of humanity... That mass of people cannot work, but they can still kill people..."
"and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless?
My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most"
On "one of the big problems with technology":
"It develops much faster than human society and human morality, and this creates a lot of tension. But, again, we can try and learn something from our previous experience with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, that actually, you saw very rapid changes in society, not as fast as the changes in technology, but still, amazingly fast.
The most obvious example is the collapse of the family and of the intimate community, and their replacement by the state and the market."
Why talk in terms of one big company? Maybe small investors with conflicting ideas and interests would like to own and run small companies. Except, a couple of big companies are making that very difficult.
The US hasn't enforced its anti-trust legislation in over 30 years. Some link Reagan's "assault" on anti-trust to the breakage of the American job market. There's been zero net job creation in the US between 1999 and 2009, a time which also saw significant consolidation.
Small businesses drive net job growth, and they are also more innovative, producing more patents per employee than large firms.
Not to mention, smaller businesses allow more people to own capital. I'm sick of economic discussions that focus on jobs and wages - ownership is what gets people out of serfdom.
But, little guys are feeling the squeeze. "The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit."
So, this isn't only about privacy, or the false perception that "big is evil." It's about economy as ecosystem. "Biodiversity" in the economy creates robustness against hard times and distributes resources in ways that allow many participants to thrive. Monocultures are extractive, and ultimately fragile.