It’s not entirely clear what he’s referring to, he just uses the term AI broadly in the context of people being worried about job losses, then talks about the reduction in secret police costs that enables, then discusses applying AI to physics.
That includes “new revenue streams” like “loyalty programs, digital advertising networks, feature upsells, and advanced reservations.” It reads like a road map that could easily lead to what the tech writer Cory Doctorow has colourfully called “enshittification” — the process whereby online platforms and services decline over time as they change from focusing on what benefits users to what benefits their bottom line.
Let’s break this down.
Now let’s look at the new scary revenue streams:
loyalty programs & digital advertising programs - both are both relatively harmless. Not ideal, but funding a public service is the best possible use for advertising revenue, so having some ads in the app is not the end of the world. And charging more for a membership tier that gives you bullshit Cineplex deals and stuff feels like a real non issue. That’s probably more aimed at getting more money out of corporations that buy those passes for employees.
advanced reservations - they’re made out to be scary boogermen, but again, are not a big deal if done right. The article acts like advanced reservations are going to be used instead of having enough bikes, but I don’t see how those are related. If anything allowing advanced reservations will mean more bikes are tied up more often, creating more pressure for bikes and racks. And it would be very nice to be able to reserve a bike for short periods, like when you’re leaving the house and walking over to it. If it’s the last bike available you may decide to not risk it, or do and get there and it’s gone, and now you have to walk several blocks back to the streetcar stop. Or it would be nice to be able to reserve a bike whole you’re in a store so you don’t come out and it’s gone. Or reserving one days ahead of time and having Bike Share ensure ones at the rack for you at that time. There’s a broad spectrum of possibilities here from exploitatively profitable, to loss leading, to charging reasonable amounts for an extra service.
feature upsells - pretty vague assuming this doesn’t include e-bikes. All I can imagine is a plan to have cargo bikes or multi person bikes, etc. It’s pure speculation but so is the author’s doom and gloom scenario.
The author’s claims that because the Bike Share subsidy is less then the TTC’s subsidy that means that every bike share costs the city less, is also nonsense. Even for the ones that displace TTC rides, the city still needs to run those buses and subways, which is why the per rider subsidy goes down as the number of transit riders goes up. This is just a truly nonsensical point to try and make.
Honestly it’s worth watching what the TPA actually does, but it really sounds like the author is complaining about one part their own speculation, and two parts the directives that city hall gives it. If city hall wants to make it a public amenity that charges nothing, then they can, if they want to try and make it revenue neutral, or even profit generating, they can, but that’s not really on TPA, the board will follow the city’s broad direction, or they’ll get replaced with people who will … by nature of being a city owned entity.
It’s not the same idea, as I didn’t advocated s studying them when they were authoritarian shitholes who were actively slaughtering their neighbours.
I claim it is a corporate problem because of things such as Meta detecting when a teen girl deleted a selfie and then showing her beauty ads.
Yeah, that’s real evil and fucked up, but the reality is that even before doing that, Facebook / Instagram was still leading to a noticeable increase in the suicide rate of teen girls.
Also these kids are going to get older, go on social media, and then have the same problems. But because they are older it seems like people don’t care about them anymore.
That’s like saying that you should let teens smoke cigarettes because they’ll get older and get exposed to them anyways. There’s inherent benefit in delaying exposure to harm, especially when your brain is developing and changing so much.
Also social media is really useful for minorities, such as queer people, to find community and support which is especially important if they happen to have bad parents or live in an unsupportive area.
I do get that and am very sympathetic to that use case. However, on balance, it still fucks up more kids then it saves. I think the appropriate middle ground is device / account based age verification without requiring IDs and documents. Then it at least leaves the door open for an older brother or concerned community member to get a kid who needs an outlet an unlocked phone, while still more broadly discouraging it’s use and denormalizing it.
Tl;dw: he has two points:
That between cameras and now AI monitoring, it has just drastically reduced the cost of running an authoritarian regime. He claims that running the Stahsi used to cost like 20% of the government budget, but can now be done for next to nothing and if will be harder for governments to resist that temptation.
That there hasn’t been much progress in the world of physics since the 70s, so what happens if you point AI and it’s compute power at the field of physics? It could see wondrous progress and a world of plenty.
Personally I think point 1 is genuinely interesting and valid, and that point 2 is kind of incredible nonsense. Yes, all other fields are just simplified forms of physics, and physics fundamentally underlies all of them. That doesn’t mean that no new knowledge has come from those fields, and that doesn’t mean that new knowledge in physics automatically improves them. Physics has in many ways, done its job. Obviously there’s still more to learn, but between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can model most human scale processes in our universe, with incredible precision. The problem is that that the closer we get to understanding the true underlying math of the universe, the harder it is to compute that math for a practical system… at a certain point, it requires a computer on the scale of the universe to compute.
Most of our practical improvements in the past decade have and will come from chemistry, and biology, and engineering in general, because there is far more room to improve human scale processes by finding shortcuts, and patterns, and designing systems to behave the way we want. AI’s computer scale pattern matching ability will undoubtedly help with that, but I think it’s less likely that it can make any true physics breakthroughs, nor that those breakthroughs would impact daily life that much.
Again though, I think that point number 1 is incredibly valid. At the end of the day incentives, and specifically cost incentives, drive a massive amount of behaviour. It’s worth thinking about how how AI changes them.
I don’t have to, I just have to name one better than Russian. Learn Ukrainian, Polish, German, French Finnish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Romanian, etc then consider Russian.
German culture and heritage was destroyed by the world wars. What remains is not what was there pre-WWII.
And I’m not cancelling or destroying anything. I’m just prioritizing cultures worth preserving over those that have been poisoned by a century of dictatorship, misinformation, and hate.
It’s not magic, it’s very simple, and it’s what Pornhub et al keep calling for: device based verification.
You do it once when you set up your OS / OS Account, and then your device can anonymously tell websites whether you are are old enough or young enough without sharing any other info.
And if it’s happening at the device level, that means that credentials and actual paper IDs arent even required, you just need a system that lets parents lock down a child device to only use their account, and set that up with their age for them (or have one of their teachers do it).
Reality: you make your money off being a social media hack who pushes outrage for clicks.
Congratulations on being an outlier.
Social media increases the rate of suicide overall though, in addition to creating increased feelings of isolation, increased inattentiveness, increased levels of rage, increased levels of political polarization, etc.
Quite frankly you have absolutely nothing to base your claim about it being a corporate problem on. There’s no evidence that Lemmy / Mastodon / Pixelfed’s “neutral” algorithms are any less toxic or soul destroying then Facebook or Tiktok’s. I personally suspect they are to some extent, but it’s also very clear that many many many people are simply addicted to rage and will find and create it online regardless of algorithm.
Removed by mod
Unintended consequences, like being happier, having lower suicide rates, and being less manipulated by toxic corporate advertising?
Don’t threaten us with a good time.
Again, that’s not what Cory Doctorow coined it to mean. However, the pressures that enshittify two sided marketplaces can be abstracted to general capitalist pressures that push you to squeeze profitability at every opportunity, even to the detriment of your customers.
Two sided marketplaces often have the dynamics of creating a massive sticky force that prevents competition or movement, which enables their exploitative behaviour, but non marketplace companies also find ways of creating that stickiness through other anti-competitive means, and the use that stickiness to make their products as shitty as possible to squeeze every penny they can put of people.
I think that Doctorow’s points about two sided marketplaces are extremely useful because of their specificity, they can lead directly to specific legislation, but the term of enshittification is rapidly expanding to be used more generally.
If something is shitty they’ll call it shitty. Enshittification is inherently used to refer to a process of getting shittier. And 99% of the time people are referring to capitalism / corporate greed as that process.
and it’s not even the way it’s usually misused, so even more confusing
How do you think it’s most commonly misused?
It does exemplify why it’s such an awful word in general though, so that’s helpful in some small way, I guess.
Why is it awful? Because people have generalized its original specific meaning? Or because of the awfulness it represents?
I watched Fallout and Silo in close succession and they felt like an inversion in terms of which parts were good.
Fallout felt like it’s scene to scene dialog was well written, but it’s overarching plot felt kind of nonsensical. Silo felt like it’s scene to scene writing was a little cheesy, but it’s bigger plot beats were far more nuanced and interesting.
I honestly have more faith that, being based on a series of books, Silo will turn out to be the better show. Fallout could be good, but it felt way more like the writers were laying down the tracks in front of the train as it was already rolling… Though again, at this point in time, Fallout’s still nowhere close to the level of bad writing that was the star wars prequels, let alone the newer three.
I do know that Cory Doctorow used it specifically to refer to the dynamics of two sided marketplaces. I chose to use it the way it’s more commonly used, to refer to the general enshittifying pressures of late stage capitalism, to get my point across.
I’m not completely sold, but at this point in time I’d say it’d work better with the new Fallout Show for one.
This would be a better comic if they chose a franchise that hadn’t been enshittified to the nth degree.
Fair enough, I am just being overly angry and hateful.