XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11
On 5/26/2024 1:37 AM, Paul wrote:
The "trust problem".
Many of the "bad scenarios" boil down to trust. And one scenario, is
practical -- what happens when you do a backup with a "Recall" on your C: . >>> The police kick down your door, pull a two year old backup and load
up the "Recall" from two years ago, for a look. Or maybe a "Recall" is
copied off your laptop, as you go through the airport security.
Historically that's not how it plays out. The vulnerability with gmail,
for example, is not that police will physically force you to hand over
email. It's already been established in court cases that Google owns
you email because it's on their server. The convenient thing about that
is that it's like online spying: frictionless. You never even have a chance
to claim illegal search and seizure. Even if you do, the reaction will be
just as Winston's is: "Hey, easy with the tinfoil hat. For now we're just tracking everything you do, for your own good."
Industry, law enforcement, advertisers and
tech companies all have a vested interest in you NOT controlling your
life or your data. So who does care? Senators Ron Wyden and Ed
Markey. And, you know, the tinfoil hat people.
That's essentially how the spyware/adware industry works. No one
has to break into your house to see what soda brand you like or what
shampoo you use. They can find out without any physical trespass
and without you knowing, by spying on you online, in stores, and in
virtually any way that's restricted to crunching digital data. Most people can't even understand how that's possible, much less educate themselves
about privacy. It's an invisible infestation.
When Target started advertising maternity products to a teenage girl
through the mail before her father knew she was pregnant, that didn't
require them to film her sex life. They only had to track what she was
buying and let the "AI" of the time speculate:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
I know that a few narrow projects, are spectacularly successful.
Allowing people to be laid off in industry. But the idea we're
spreading general purpose AGI with this stuff, is just silly.
The metric, is the quality of the Dad Jokes :-)
I saw an example recently of how it's now possible to generate
4 realistic photos almost instantly, of a pig wearing a St Patricks
Day hat, eating corned beef and cabbage, and watching TV... using
Copilot. So, eat your words, buddy boy. :)
That's all the proof I need. Watch out Blue Mountain eCards. From
now on I'm sending people a deepfake video of Scarlett Johanssen
doing a striptease on top of Mt Everest while holding a pizza
delivery box full of Cocoa Puffs and doing Zoomba with an alien. The
sky's the limit. (I heard that OpenAI has already imitated SJ's voice,
having failed to get permission to use it legally.)
Of course, it will be tough to transition from my older eMiracles.
I've become addicted to using my Kin phone to access Longhorn
Hailstorm services, while calling my chiropractor on my SPOT watch.
And it's hard to give up all those disappearing eBooks on my Kindle.
But progress waits for no man.
There's actually an interesting precedent for this. Remember
when Active Desktop came out? It was a dismal failure as an
ad platform on Windows. But the public never even knew that that
was what it was supposed to be. At the time there was PC mania and
Internet mania. There were Internet keyboards with buttons to get your
email. There was the "romcom" hit movie You've Got Mail. There was
also a lapdog tech media that was only too happy to sing the praises
of the ruling titans who advertised in their magazines.
Windows had been rendered "webby". Folder windows on Windows
were literally webpages in IE. The public was also oblivious to that.
Yet the surface effect was not a failure. The tech media dutifully
praised Microsoft brilliance and Bill Gates's "vision". (Last I heard,
Gates was still visioning his way into taking over public education
and converting it into his own business.)
Just by making Windows look "webby", Bill Gates was widely celebrated
as a visionary who had "turned the Microsoft ship on a dime". I read
exactly that phrase in numerous places. By turning folders into mock
browsers, Bill Gates had foreseen and exploited the coming Internet Age. Windows was relevant, big time -- leading the charge to the future. And
Steve Ballmer stressed his blood pressure, as usual, to scream that
"We will win the Web!" (Business Week interview 2005) as Microsoft
readied the next phase of owning computing with the likes of Hailstorm.
In some ways Bill Gates was ahead of his time. What he tried to do with
slim PCs, Active Desktop, Hailstorm, Passport and SPOT watches
eventually took shape as online services and cellphone apps. (MS are
even now pretending that Passport has been there all along.) Gates just
tried to implement it using 400 MHz Celerons and 56K modems, with no
online services infrastructure in place. His visionary idea was merely to
sell Desktop space to Disney for ads. "Channels", Microsoft called them.
Surely people would want updating Disney ads on their Desktops? That's
webby, right?
Gates's inflated view of his own
brilliance, combined with the dullwitted assumption that the purpose
of business is greed, led to a series of very clever failures and a lot of marketing fuel. So Active Desktop was arguably not a failure, because
the lapdog tech media cast it as cutting edge.
I expect it will be the same this time. As long as people think that
AI is here to transform humanity and change the meaning of life, any
company decorating themselves with AI will be cutting edge. Partying
pigs watching TV is just an example that us normal people can understand.
No doubt those scientist people are doing amazing things beyond our comprehension, like planning food production on Bezos's moon bases.
(And we'll be able to eat as much moon food as we like without getting
fat or getting cellulite!)
Stock analysts will judge those companies yapping about AI to be
a force to contend with. And to some extent they'll be right. Look at
Google. They became a billion dollar company by perfecting search. But
that pales next to their success in creating an international spyware
behemoth powered by dependable, free, online tools. Google's
sleaze is the cutting edge of applied tech. I expect that
MS are currently trying to pull a Netscape against Google: Cut off their
air supply, as Gates so delicately put it, by spying directly at the source. People fantasize about how the future will be profoundly different. But
we're still humans, whether or not we have a robot to brush our teeth.
In the final analysis it will always about market share and getting laid.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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