The net’s long decline into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four” isn’t a mystery. Nor was it by any means a forgone conclusion. Instead, we got here through a series of conscious actions by big businesses and lawmakers that put antitrust law into a 40-year coma.
The federal government should not have warrantless, backdoor access to private communication systems like Twitter.
My experiences in the War on Terror provided me with a glimpse of the AI revolution that is now remaking America’s political system and culture in ways that have already proved incompatible with our system of democracy and self-government and may soon become irreversible.
America has a monopoly problem. Most industries in the United States have consolidated in recent decades,1 and markups and profits have dramatically increased since around 1980.
If the fabric is error-free, and can send and receive between hosts at interface speed with no buffering or delay, a case can be made for a different kind of stream protocol, which implies perhaps less overhead per host to manage that stream of data.
The real problem Altman is trying to solve—and everyone knows this—is how to use the power of the federal government to prevent competitors from upsetting OPENAI’s current market position.
Even if we assume that the tendency towards pseudoscience and poor research isn’t inherent to the culture of AI research and just take for granted that, in a burst of enlightened self-awareness, the entire industry is going to spontaneously fall out of love with nonsense ideas and hyperbolic claims, the secrecy should still bother us.
As Tesla CEO and Twitter mogul Elon Musk tells it, I may be unproductive — despite the multiple articles and extensive work I produce each week — and immoral.
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