Director James Cameron on why Big Tech owning AGI is scarier than any science fiction he's ever made:
"AGI will not emerge from a government funded program. It will emerge from one of the tech giants currently funding this multi-billion dollar research."
And when that happens, he warns, you won't get a vote on it:
"So then you'll be living in a world that you didn't agree to, didn't vote for, that you are co-inhabiting with a super intelligent alien species that answers to the goals and rules of a corporation."
A corporation that already knows everything about you:
"An entity which has access to the comms, beliefs, everything you ever said, and the whereabouts of every person in the country via your personal data."
From there, the slide toward something far darker is shorter than most people think:
"Surveillance capitalism can toggle pretty quickly into digital totalitarianism."
And even the best-case outcome isn't reassuring. Tech giants becoming the self-appointed arbiters of human good is, as he puts it, the fox guarding the hen house.
He's not buying the idea that these companies would stay benevolent with that kind of power:
"They would never ever think of using that power against us and strip mining us for our last drop of cash."
The sarcasm is the point.
Cameron has spent four decades imagining worst-case futures on screen. His verdict on this one:
"That's a scarier scenario than what I presented in the Terminator 40 years ago, if for no other reason than it's no longer science fiction."
The Atlantic has a sobering, first-person look at the ramifications of legalized online sports betting. Here are a few of the more telling passages.
1/5
@WSJ Too bad the Q4 print today missed the @theallinpod taping!I really enjoy the conversations on these macro topics and I am genuinely curious how this group views 1.4% as I just finished last week's episode @chamath was expecting 5+%!
I24: “China has scaled back the use of bots and coordinated messaging to push anti-Israel narratives. Beijing appears to be easing its rhetoric as it seeks to position itself between both sides” - Carice Witte
Two years ago, Hamas falsely claimed Israel bombed a hospital—“500 killed.”
It was a Palestinian rocket, hit a parking lot, and fewer than 20 died.
The media ran with it anyway.
Today: 2,000+ Iranians murdered, on video—Silence.
Childcare is important. But, in light of the fraud that we have seen in Minnesota and California, shouldn’t we make sure that there are mechanisms in place to ensure that the $2.8 billion that NY state is already spending annually is not wasted on fraud before we increase the annual budget by $1.7 billion?