I remember when Minority Report came out how many people got sucked in by the Tom Cruise and the Max von Sidow vibes, the Oscar-winning histrionics of the imperiled character, or the sexy special effects and completely missed the subtext around all of this. That everywhere you went, They knew who you are and what you do.
I was shocked that people I talked to didn't notice that every vertical surface in the mall had advertisements on it. Asking his new eyeballs if he needed more khakis? Did we not watch the same movie?
"My team and I are proud to share with the world something special we've been working hard on. We are finally ready to launch the Torture Nexus, inspired by the unforgettable technology in the classic scifi novel 'Don't create the Torture Nexus'"
Well, the every wall is just for movie visuals. In reality it will be projected right onto your retina or, using neuralink, right into the visual cortex or may be even deeper than that.
I walked by one of these scanning offices in São Paulo a few weeks ago and it looked completely dystopian. Didn't have the impression that the people who showed up there were well informed on what they were signing up for
There is one near home. When I passed by I saw one man stopping a couple in the street and explaining if they couldn’t go inside and give him the money.
Sort of like a beggar, but asking the couple to go inside, scan their iris then giving him the money (since it’s free money anyway). I am not sure how that would work in practice, since I just passing by. But they were paying USD50~60 , a significant amount to make the ask worth it.
How much iris variation (within that population) exists, are there any repeats (or repeats below threshold), is there any correlation between (say) iris pattern categories and facial pattern categories, etc.
Someone may think these are useful questions and this may be the first of many such data collection actions about the globe.
It's also riffed on in Treehouse of Horror on the Simpsons, but I am sad to say that episode now happened closer to the Twilight Zone episode than to today. We crossed that bridge in 2018.
Perspective is strange. I suspect we're not far from a time when a show such as the Brady Bunch will be as bizarre to the modern mind as the most severe Twilight Zone episode was in its time.
pretty sure the people having their irises scanned are the “tools” and the “humanity” it’s for are the other two thousand five hundred or so billionaires on the earth
Concerning isn't even the word. Looks like those military contracts and all that government money has really heated things up for OpenAI's goals for human civilization.
So you don’t think Sam Altruistic Altman is really just in it for helping out the human race by creating “a global identity system through scanning people's irises”…?
Thanks for calming me down. I totally forgot about how nothing absolutely horrible could be done to private citizens from generative AI implemented at a tremendous scale. I am also truly super glad we have so many tech billionaires now so openly participating in governments foreign and domestic. I was almost concerned for a moment. Have to run, I have to go ask Chat what I should eat for dinner, intimate questions about my current prescription medications leading me to worry about these things, my idea for a great start up company, and how to respond to my current boss about our financial situation. Everything is fine.
yes? all hardware they use is free of conflict minerals, all energy consumed on their servers is clean and has no impact on fauna e flora, copyright with all the possible training data they need is already solved in a bipartisan way AND their company pays no more than 7:1 ratio [0] for CEOs vs. bottom of chain workers /s
there's also the need for a global identity controlled by a private company of country X, as we are close to have no borders worldwide (continents drift soon will merge everything into a new Pangaea, gotta be prepared)
The sad thing is that this really does solve a problem that GenAI is creating. Sam Altman is selling the poison as well as the cure.
I think we will eventually all need to join social networks that are guaranteed to be composed of real humans, and for that we'll need a way to prove someone is a real human. I think passports/government IDs are a good enough solution for this and we don't need to be scanning people's irises.
The purpose of the scanning is so you are limited to one account per human rather than being able to open loads. It's not used as ID after the account is open.
I'm not sure either is quite accurate. When you get an account you get given worldcoins on a regular basis which are basically another crypto shitcoin. They have plans to use it as a payment and app ecosystem but that hasn't really taken off. The anti spam identity thing hasn't really even started either.
I think it's important to remark that this "could" help solve part of the problems associated with Generative AI. It could also, without many new laws and regulations, be used to create many new problems unique to generative AI.
> I think we will eventually all need to join social networks that are guaranteed to be composed of real humans, and for that we'll need a way to prove someone is a real human.
Sometimes I think we are in a kind of civilization downgrade, but no one wants to talk about it. This initiative by Sam, proves my (not so wacky) theory.
Funny though is that if you share this kind of stuff on Linkedin, people just look away. Indeed, it's not a place to say what you think: it's all about look nice and please anyone who's capable of giving you a job, even if it's some Big Tech dictator.
I understand. There might be great reasons to not step up and say what is wrong, even when the truth is obvious...
Not the objective of the post but, it still creeps me out that, we don't have on Linkedin, a space to say what what it's (undoubtly) wrong.
It's part of our daily lives as workers, to say that we have an elephant in the room, even if it's with a company and it's eerie intentions towards the humanity, just to please shareholders and keep its value in the stock market.
Fear is a great motivator to stay silent, which should be bothering people…especially people claiming to want government to stay out of their personal lives.
Sadly, in the end, people are generally more selfish than righteous.
I wonder what Altman is thinking. From the outside it seems clear he’s chasing profit, but I wonder if he honestly believes something this concerning will be a force for good and actually used to benefit humanity as a whole.
We've had plenty of insights on what Altman is thinking from one of the people who spent lots of time at his side and know him best: pg.
Lots of pg tweets/comments over the years about how the thing Sam is best at, and what drives him the most, is climbing up ladders and acquiring power.
He urgently came to the previous administration along with a committee, presenting a plan for the construction of Nuclear Power Plants, focused on serving datacenters for AI, with the excuse that, if the US don't do this, China will do, and he or his team not even consulted the IAEA for this topic.
He might have a point but, still looks like the Salesperson of a Insurance company. The idea is not absurd, but the approach and the speech, seems quite cheap.
I see nothing on his talks that are genuine about solving crucial problems of the humanity...
Clear to me that he's very into keeping the costumer (investors) satisfied.
>... The ban, effective from Saturday, aims to ensure individuals' free will remains uninfluenced...
As a happy worldcoiner I'd much rather be able to use my free will to sign up with who I like rather than having ill informed government officials try to ban transactions between informed, otherwise happy adults because why not stick your foot in other people's business?
And as a happy coinless worlder I'd much rather use my free will to prevent you from enabling systems being built that could endanger my free will and that of my progenies' in the future, and will exercise said free will to encourage government officials--on a case-by-case basis when necessary-- to ban said trash.
> Curing Malaria is cool but is there nothing in Seattle that he can contribute to?
Nothing in this sentence gave you pause for a second thought? Would you replace Jonas Salk with a community garden?
The criticism of Altman is apt because he hasn't achieved anything of definitive social value. (Not in a way someone else wouldn't have on a similar timeline.) Equating anything he's done to the eradication of malaria is pure scope failure.
> let's not feed green-account trolls with words of calculated malice
Let's "assume good faith" and "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize" [1].
They may be a troll, or an idiot. Or they may be reflecting an increasingly-prevalent view that people should stick to their "own" territory, for various definitions of "own." (Whether this fuel anti-immigrant xenophobia, colonist/coloniser moral binaries, or the dismissal or a disease eradicator.)
Their work in education has often been a mixed bag, sometimes spending huge amounts of money to enact initiatives based on little or no empirical research that ultimately hurt the students who have the misfortune of being saved by yet another tech billionaire who believes skill in computer programming and business mean they’re an authority on everything.
Others have called out how silly your comparison is, but Gates and Microsoft have contributed to plenty of local things. Bill and Melinda have given hundreds of millions to local universities [1], tens of millions to local schools [2], millions to local charities [3] and you'll find their names on the donor lists of plenty of local institutions (arts, etc.). You could have seen all of this with a single search for "Bill Gates Seattle donation" but instead came here to make malicious accusations.
"The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious. iniquitous. But disinterestedness, equity, and concord reigned within his walls. Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors."
I was shocked that people I talked to didn't notice that every vertical surface in the mall had advertisements on it. Asking his new eyeballs if he needed more khakis? Did we not watch the same movie?