He’s more like a ten year old boy who fucks three-year-old girls who don’t yet have the language to say what happened to them…and when they get snitchy, he threatens them with violence to shut them up, often demonstrating on a small animal.
I think I’m trying to say he’s not just a precocious kid with anger issues, but a precocious kid with a cruelty streak and symptoms of physical neurological effects and poses a danger to himself and others.
Let them scrape. AI as it currently is, is still autocomplete with extra steps, and still prone to hallucination. As it is it will be usable to make cheap, passable content, but not hit those moments of inspiration of human art (yet – there are real AI groups looking to make AGI)
It is a bubble which will pop and AI will be seen as a tool (a resource-costly tool) that requires its own set of experts independent from the experts that use ACAD or write editorial copy or do investigative work. Id est, it’s not the replacement of employees that boards of directors want it to be.
And AGI is centuries from being efficient enough that you can make Rosie the Robot who cleans your house and makes a good upside-down pineapple cake.
This is something we have to work out as a society. Even among the far left total-inclusion total-equality community (anyone else? anyone?) there are people who are contemptible, whether for being social renegades, for being exceptionally violent, for being perversely interested in taboos (pedophiles, for instance), for being too rich or too poor, for being the wrong kind of sick or disabled (we crazies get a lot of flack), there are still some we resent.
Fifteen-year-old teenagers are a big group. We want to lock the girls up in the basement and maroon the boys on an island. I’ve heard podcasters recognize that teenage incels in the alt-right-to-MAGA pipeline are being totally abandoned and led by society to join Trump’s War Boys. But fuck those guys.
We need a society that respects the rights and protections of everyone, no matter how despicable or ugly or contemptible or rude they are.
For instance, when investigating violent criminals in the 20th century, we started allowing for illegally obtained evidence, searches made without a warrant, coerced confessions and such, but since the perp committed heinous crimes it was just too difficult to allow them to walk, given what they did… And with time, that set precedent for black guys possessing a gram of crack or paraphernalia, even if they had no record of violent crime or even property crime.
And now the US has, by far, the highest incarceration rate in the world.
So when we start again, rights and protections have to be guaranteed to absolutely everyone. Sustenance sufficient to live has to be available to absolutely every last person. No exceptions, even when they really don’t deserve it. (In fact, by being a human being, they do.)
Until we figure out how to assure the inclusivity circle doesn’t leak, every society will drift toward autocracy. Again.
We may well be. As we careen towards great filters like the climate crisis (and running out of fresh water for agriculture) we may drive ourselves to extinction, or (if we’re… lucky?) close enough to extinction that all our present culture and most of our scientific knowledge is lost.
The version in which one out of eight people survives, is the good ending. Then we might be able to adjust our institutions to the smaller population. But expect all the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to put on a show, and claim their due.
But here we are under Trump dealing with the same kinds of problems that arose under Hitler and Mussolini and countless other dictators. We’re going to keep doing this thing where we let small factions game the system for themselves until we figure out how to effectively prevent it. If we don’t figure it out then in a hundred-thousand years, when the atmosphere has healed and the plastic has mostly been cleared from nature and we start populating again, we’ll still have the same problem… or maybe not. Maybe we’ll have evolved a bit.
(Homo Erectus experienced a similar period of scarcity and a population of less than 10,000 until the world got more habitable, and they got pushed out by competing hominids like us.)
We need to end the war of kings and resolve our grievances so we can face the ice zombie army from the north… and unlike Season 8, we’re pretty sure killing the Ice King isn’t going cause an ontological collapse the way killing Sauron collapsed the organization structure of the goblins and they fled back to the mountain caves. (GRRM was all about subverting fantasy tropes that didn’t mesh with real-life experience)
I wasn’t meaning to imply that restricting societies to small states is the solution, only that once a state gets larger than a village there’s going to be factioning and rivalry (and hence renegade behavior either to harm or subvert institutions).
Just as we found an alternative solution to infectious disease (centralized disease control, when we give it a proper budget) we need to find an alternative solution to factioning and subversion than keeping groups small. We just don’t know how to do it. Yet.
SMBC once posited a gamification of being nice to each other, in which society was self policing because everyone behaved with benevolence for the points. So I’m not the only person who’s thought about this.
Plenty of women – teenage parochial schoolgirls, specifically, get impregnated as virgins when the definition of virgin is not having coital sex or having an intact vaginal corona (hymen). When boys and girls who love each other very much make out and get overly involved, yet their pregnancy concerns (and guilt) keep them from engaging in actual coitus, even a small amount of jizz on her vulva might make their way through the vaginal canal and cause conception.
Plenty of medical doctors have encountered unexpected pregnancy of women who’ve never had sex and who had intact vaginal coronas.
However at the beginning of the common era, virgin was assumed of any unmarried woman unless known otherwise, and was a shift of property value of the woman to the father or husband. Mary who was unmarried, would be a virgin by default as a young woman. Though her pregnancy is evidence that she isn’t a virgin.
Too be fair, in Hellenic culture Zeus raped me was a common excuse when a young woman fooled around without license, and ended up in a family way, and before the era of the Olympian, Poseidon was the one going around having his way with young women. In fact, the classical myths teem with children sired by gods. This isn’t new.
I’m still waiting for the complete U.S. Senate report on CIA torture, the full 6,700 page report that was suppressed until Trump ordered it destroyed in January 2017. We hope there’s a surviving copy.
If anything short of the entire annotated Epstein casefile is not released, even if it’s lightly redacted, I greatly hope it might spark the downfall of the US federal government, the rise of a European led provisional state and the breaking (if temporary) of the states into multiple factions that don’t get back together until we fix the Constitution of the United States (Version 2) to provide equal protection and equal inclusion for all, probably the process of about eight to fifteen years. In a century the US will be the model of democracy on which new states model theirs.
Maybe it’s a system of sortition. Yes, I’m getting carried away with this fantasy.
That way it goes down in history that a bunch of aristocrats fucked around, tried to cover it up and the resulting outrage changed civilization for the better.
That is a valid concern, one that was not as great when the funerary rites were first invented.
At this point it’s a clear problem of human bias. We love our instincts so much that when we have sufficient power, we’ll assure that people never challenge them, even when the offices we hold require reason contrary to those instincts.
The whole bit about bullshit jobs serves as an example, because our upper management desire to hold court and have courtiers and garden hermits buzzing about them like components of an orrery (I’m teaching my spellchecker words today).
In the media industry the process of crunching developers to make deadlines (even though it kills productivity and slows the rate of progress) is another example, and yet all the AAA game development companies do it… or are doing it so long as they exist. Our private equity firms are now doing to the big ones what was once done to Toys 'r Us, leaving a sinkhole of debt and bankruptcy where there was once a reputable company.
Our inability to see our community past our top fifty Facebook friends (or fellow villagers) prevents us from thinking in terms of cooperating with society, rather we deign ourselves part of the true Americans (or Belgians or Maoists or whatever), and so we fail to recognize personal greed as a mental disorder, rather a moral failing.
In a Star Trek society, someone who hoarded liquidatable assets would be regarded similar to someone who filled their house with junk (and hopefully not as they are abused on Bravo), we’d intervene, put them in a rehab center for a year, where they learn to exist in the comfort of minimalism. But in our own world, extremely wealthy people are regarded as a a higher strata of person, given power and authority to command PMCs, and eventually swarm-armies of killer robots managed by AI.
Currently, our tolerance of human billionaires is killing us, and it poses a global catastrophic risk not just of the human species but of 90%+ of all species on the planet.
There are problems with policing that are pretty universal, some of which are acknowledged in Peel’s Principles of Policing way back with the Bow Street Runners. But while those principles are taught to every cadet, here in the states we otherwise ignore them.
There’s absolutely problems with drift, away from participation of the community and toward control, and while I can’t speak for which part of the Americas you’re in (the RCM have enough annual incidents to fall neatly into the ACAB category) I can say there are problems with giving one group of people authority over the rest that we’ve yet to fully solve.
Still, it’s especially bad in the states, and when black US tourists find themselves in conversation with law enforcement in Europe, the extreme level of contrition they sometimes show is an embarrassment to everyone, but a shame of the United States.
Your province is not in the US.
When you cremate your remains and then seed the ocean with your ashes, it feeds the bottom of the ecosystem.
CORRECTION Cremated remains have all organic compounds broken down and is a process used to stow or preserve remains (since it’s mostly carbon, it can be used to make an artificial diamond). Also someone I know who planned on this as his return to earth funerary choice was misinformed.
That said, there is a tradition to carve a cadaver up and grind the bones and make sausages for the local wildlife, who will happily partake. In fact part of the ritual is noisy and consistent so as to inform the locals that dinnertime is coming.
Just drop the body into the wilds and the local fauna (mostly invertebrates) will do a fantastic job of utilizing your remains, and reintroducing the material back into the ecosystem. Avoid permafrost places like the Himalayas, seas that are lifeless (like the Dead Sea). Deserts will just desiccate you quickly.
Planting your body under a sapling (without formaldehyde or any other preservatives) will make sure you’re literally worm food.
I don’t, and Karl Marx explains this is the inevitable outcome of a capitalist system in Das Kapital.
Right now the EU is trying its hand at it by making a regulatory system that is difficult to influence. It’s happening, and some countries have devolved into neoliberal parties vs. far-right (monarchist) parties, showing us that Marx is once again right.
If I were to get a soviet (lower case) committee of scholars to hammer out a workable system, I’d avoid capitalism in favor of a post-scarcity socialist / communist state (and if we don’t have the means to kick off with one, then we’d lay out a tech-tree path towards one.
But that’s not how societies work. We have to work towards a world in which people are given the liberty to live as they please, and not be burdened by want of essentials. We can’t seize all the property today and have food kiosks available tomorrow.
Also, I’m not even a poli-sci graduate, and I’d defer to those who’ve actually learned the history and checklists. But I could see a country deciding to invest some taxes in a massive potato growing project, and offering free potatoes to everyone; as much as they need. And then following up with other extremely common, extremely useful products (pencils and paper)? Lumber in standard sizes? Steel wood screws? Eventually, the state would offer protein bars and issue bog standard smart phones.
We’ve already seen ur-programs like this, from government cheese, food stamps and SNAP to the electric companies offering flourescent bulbs and later LED bulbs to get all households on the same page.
That said, these are all guesses. I can’t predict the future and how we advance.
It really is like a movie where all the bad guys share a style so we know which ones to root against.
It’s the 21st century version of the full-face covering, the stormtrooper helmet.
The federal government really has been taken over by the Legion of Super-Villains
I wouldn’t hold my breath either.
Human society continues to careen towards multiple great filters it is ill-prepared to navigate, and the trillion-dollar propaganda machine that got Trump elected works. We just may not be evolved to cooperate at the level that gets us to community-based governments without monied interests interfering.
Mark Twain invested his money into the Paige Compositor, an automated mechanical typesetter, which had over a thousand moving parts in an era that lacked the capacity for precision molding. Babbage constructed the difference engine 2 which worked like a charm when built by students a century later, but he was defunded at the wrong time.
Sometimes we’re just not ready for good ideas, and not capable of implementing them at the time they are discovered.
All Cops Are Bastards, a sentiment that arises from the blue code of silence, so that even the well-meaning ones are obligated to lie in court to defend the violent ones, what allowed the loyalty-over-principle sector to rise into power, which is why there is such staunch resistance against publication of disciplinary hearings against police who misbehaved or broke laws, even though such documents are supposed to be public as per FOIA statutes.
When California passed a law reinforcing the notion that such files would be made accessible to the public, the precincts literally shredded or burned their files.
The institutions are corrupt through and through. It was especially evident during the Ferguson unrest, when the blue lines showed they had no trigger discipline for the military hardware they were wielding. It was laughable, except for the danger they were posing to the demonstrators.
Officers who seek to serve their communities quit. Some of them have publicly denounce police services and have become staunch police abolitionists. The only officers that remain are either violent killers, or the ones willing to cover for violent killers.
All cops are bastards.
It’s a long process, especially since people who have a lot of power really, really, really want to keep it.
For now the process is getting people on the same page. Or as a certain poet put it:
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be one
We need to pursue a society in which everyone has equal access to rights and resources, where no one has to worry about food or shelter from the elements, or whether their family will be ripped away from them due to circumstances. Where no-one is given exception, even when they are deeply in debt or committed heinous crimes, or are the most deviant of sexual perverts. We can include them and address the issues as well.
A society in which everyone has exactly the same amount of political power may not be possible but we can get closer to this than we are now. This is what that more perfect union bit is about.
We need to less follow ideologies which operate more like divine command theory as dicta or creeds, and more see societal models as exactly that: models. We know democracy on its own needs to be fine tuned. We know capitalism works only when well regulated and upper management isn’t allowed to behave irresponsibly. We know command economics requires a lot of deliberation and the willingness to listen to and address gripes from the public. The end goal is still the same: Everyone eats. Everyone is warm. Everyone is welcome.
This is my mission statement.
As in precocious puberty. Kids who are sexually activated (by premature hormone reactions which can be triggered – not always – by sexual abuse) so they get sexually interested before their peers, and ruin recess for everyone else.
When I was growing up (mind you, I was a late, late bloomer) precocious puberty in girls was punished brutally (say being grounded for life). Precocious puberty in boys was rewarded with early sports careers, unless you sucked, in which case you were punished for being a sex pest. This was a source of bullies that preyed on the rest of us.
This is to say, the US really doesn’t know how to parent or teach or otherwise administrate children. This is also to say I am way, way bitter about it.
ETA This is one of the purposes of puberty blockers, when it’s not used to let questioning trans kids decide to deliberate on what they want to be for a while, so I hope things are generally better. But then, considering how puberty blockers are now politicized, precocious puberty is also politicized, which ruins everyone’s Sunday brunch.